Updates from Nationwide, ABN Amro and Spectris
Another lift for the FTSE 100 on Thursday, up 50 points to 6,329.9. Johnson Matthey shares surged almost 10% higher to 2694p helped by a special dividend boost and the fall-out from the VW crisis - Matthey is a catalytic convertor maker - while CRH leapt 5.4% taking it to 1875p. Despite a pretty downbeat update yesterday morning Royal Mail shares rose almost 5% to 476.70p. The main loser yesterday was G4S, down almost 3% to 225.80p.
In the US shares flatlined more or less at 17,732.7 though there was a 3.4% surge for Intel. However healthcare stocks dived sharply with UnitedhealthGroup down 5.6% - it cut its earnings forecast - and Pfizer down 3%.
We start with new numbers from Nationwide. Pre-tax profits for the big UK lender come in at £801m for the six months to the end of September. It's a substantial rise (pre-tax profits were under £600m this time last year) - a 27% lift in total.
Gross mortgage lending jumped 14% to £14.9bn, which is a 13.2% chunk overall of the UK market overall. Nationwide says its capital ratio now stands at 21.9% (4 April 2015: 19.8%) and leverage ratio has climbed to 4.2% (4 April 2015: 4.1%).
"We have," says the lender, "expanded our current account base, opening over a quarter of a million new accounts during the past six months, up 13% on the same period last year."
We move onto ABN Amro - formerly bought, then spat out by RBS and Santander - and a new valuation of €17.75. ABN Amro was nationalised following the 2008 financial crash; the current IPO will raise around €3.3bn for the Dutch government; the bank looks strong on the dividend front, initially.
Much of the offer is being taken by institutional investors though the Dutch government is holding a tranche back for retail investors. (It's thought the total ABN Amro bailout cost approached €32bn.) Overall the bank is valued at close to €17bn.
ABN Amro focuses mainly on mortgages; recently it announced net profits of more than €500m for the latest quarter, up 33%. It's the biggest float of a European bank since the financial meltdown of 2008.
We end with instrumentation and controls player Spectris; it says group like-for-like sales declined one per cent in the four months to 31 October, with trading conditions worsening as the period progressed it says.
Sales to North America are down three per cent and there was a significant decline in sales to the rest of the world, principally driven by weakness in Russia and Latin America it adds.
"Materials Analysis and Test and Measurement both continued to deliver LFL sales growth," it says "whilst sales declined in both In-line Instrumentation and, more markedly, in Industrial Controls."
