Investors Chronicle articles from February 2007

Investors Chronicle archives from February 2007

COZART (CZT).
February 2, 2007... Alongside these results, Cozart held a presentation to analysts about its joint venture with Philips to develop a rapid-result roadside drug-testing kit, and representatives of the electronics giant demonstrated their support by attending. The...

PZ CUSSONS (PZC).
February 2, 2007... The growth story continues at PZ Cussons, with the international consumers group reporting strong performances in its core markets of the UK, Nigeria and Indonesia. In the UK, the Imperial Leather brand worked up a bit of a lather, making...

AFREN (AFR).
February 2, 2007... 54p - Aim - Afren's shares - in common with those of many other smaller oil companies - have been on a rollercoaster over the past six months. Sector weakness driven by negative sentiment was compounded in Afren's case by delays to the...

GW PHARMA (GWP).
February 2, 2007... "A big year is coming up," admits GW Pharma's managing director, Justin Gover. Indeed, as Jonathan Senior, an analyst at Evolution Securities bluntly puts it, 2007 is a "put up or shut up" year for the cannabis drug developer. After so far...

CREST NICHOLSON (CRST).
February 2, 2007... These may be the last results that Crest Nicholson releases as a publicly-listed company, if private-equity consortium Castle Bidco follows through with its possible bid. Castle Bidco, led by HBOS and entrepreneur Tom Hunter's West Coast...

SIG (SHI).
February 2, 2007... Moves to improve the energy efficiency of buildings have put insulation at the forefront of the climate change debate and, as Europe's largest supplier of insulation materials, SIG is well-placed to benefit. But with climate change bringing...

EASYJET (EZJ).
February 2, 2007... 626p - Travel & leisure - EasyJet is growing fast and, more importantly, it's growing profitably. The company almost trebled its earnings per share between 2003 and 2006, and there is more where that came from. Investment bank Dresdner...

ROYAL & SUN ALLIANCE (RSA).
February 2, 2007... 165p - Non-life insurance - To be fair, the chief executive of Royal & Sun Alliance (RSA), Andy Haste, has achieved much since taking over from Bob Mendelsohn in 2002. He inherited a group that was being forced to boost provisions against US...

AUTONOMY (AU.).
February 2, 2007... 580p - Software & computer services - Two weeks ago, before Autonomy announced its 2006 results, its shares fell 4 per cent after a US research organisation, the Center for Financial Research and Analysis (CFRA), released a report that...

INTERACTIVE WORLD (ITW).
February 2, 2007... 81p - Aim - The mobile content sector had a dire 2006, with profit warnings dominating market sentiment. But, despite that gloom, Interactive World kept plugging away, growing sales and profits - and paying a hefty dividend. Interactive...

SYSTEM C HEALTHCARE (SYS).
February 2, 2007... 25p - Aim - System C Healthcare was forced to put out a profit warning just a week before its recent first-half results, so it actually did rather well to limit its operating loss in the period to just GBP44,000. The warning was down to what it...

N BROWN (BWNG).
February 2, 2007... A trading update from N Brown - which specialises in clothing for older and larger customers - justifies ongoing optimism in the home-shopping retail sub-sector. Indeed, the company's underlying sales for the 21 weeks to 20 January 2007 rose by...

QINETIQ (QQ.).
February 2, 2007... A string of good news has boosted QinetiQ's shares from a low of 160p last summer to a recent high of 220p. The Metrix consortium headed by the group won the 25-year, GBP16bn contract to reorganise the training and associated logistics,...

RAB CAPITAL (RAB).
February 2, 2007... RAB Capital reported an impressive performance for the year to end-December 2006 in its recent trading update. The fund-management group runs absolute-return funds, the performance of which is measured in actual percentage returns rather than...

The price of fish.
February 2, 2007... Next Wednesday, Templeton Emerging Markets Investment Trust - the GBP1.8bn giant of its sector -is holding an unusual special meeting. There will be no voting, since no resolutions are to be proposed. Instead, it will be a forum for the trust's...

Price and prejudice.
February 2, 2007... One consequence of doing something for a long time is that you accumulate a ragbag of prejudices. Of course, prejudices get a bad press - they imply all sorts of politically incorrect notions that we needn't go into. Yet, quite often, they're...

Alternative investment.
February 2, 2007... Tuesday 9 January: Toy-boy tales 9pm: Eunice is out with Irmgard when the phone rings. Turns out to be Angharad, former head girl, life-class model and chief sorceress of St Celia's old girls' coven. As always, she catches me off balance....

Identity crisis.
February 2, 2007... What is 'Britishness'? In the past week, thIS iS a question that has excised politicians, newspaper editors and pub bores of every complexion - from Straw to Brown, from red top to Berliner, from India Pale Ale enthusiast to Australian lager...

I-mate with no mates.
February 2, 2007... I-mate shares have halved, after chief executive Jim Morrison warned that results for this year and next will be "very significantly below market estimates" due to supply problems. The Dubai-based maker of smart phones had similar problems in...

Auto industry faces trying times.
February 2, 2007... In the same week that the BBC Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond returned to work after burying a jet-powered car into the Yorkshire turf, the Ford Motor Car company posted its largest ever loss. But while these events appear seemingly...

BA takes a GBP72m hit from cabin fever.
February 2, 2007... British Airways (BA) averted a cabin crew strike this week after securing an eleventh-hour agreement with the union. However, the deal didn't come in time for BA to shift passengers back onto flights that had been cancelled, so analysts still...

Bodycote boosted by bid rumour.
February 2, 2007... Bodycote's shares leapt 19 per cent on speculation of a possible bid from private-equity group Apax. Most of the attention focused on the possibility of a break-up of the group, as Bodycote has built its higher-value materials testing division...

Cairn slips on murky update.
February 2, 2007... Shares in Cairn Energy lost ground this week after a trading update failed to provide real clarity on either pipeline negotiations with the Indian government, which may further delay production from its flagship Rajasthan assets, or the return...

Carpetright's threadbare sales.
February 2, 2007... Carpetright's third-quarter rise in UK like-for-like sales of 0.1 per cent looks paltry, even against a wafer-thin first-half rise of 0.9 per cent. However, in the first half, the group was up against an easy comparative of -7.1 per cent in the...

F&C tanks on fund outflows.
February 2, 2007... Shares in fund manager F&C slumped 19 per cent to 169p on news that its clients had continued to withdraw significant amounts of money. Net outflows hit GBP3.4bn during the fourth quarter and F&C said that it's been notified by clients of a...

Harvey Nash beats expectations.
February 2, 2007... Recruitment company Harvey Nash has had to tell the City to buck up its expectations for the year because "improved performance across all of the group's businesses has exceeded management's expectations." The professional services job market...

New access to IPOs.
February 2, 2007... Broker Redmayne Bentley has launched a managed service to offer private investors access to initial public offerings (IPOs) in which they would otherwise be unable to invest. There were more than 300 IPOs in the UK last year, but most were...

Anite swallows Invenova.
February 2, 2007... Anite has acquired Invenova, which tests WiMax equipment for all major developers of the wide-area wireless technology. It will pay up to GBP6.2m for the India-based company, which turned over GBP1.3m last year. WiMax is a promising, but...

Block shield picks up new order.
February 2, 2007... Block Shield, the electro-magnetic shielding and radio frequency tagging specialist, has completed a new manufacturing module capable of producing over 50m of its new generation tags a year. And customer Mu-Gahat has formed a strategic alliance...

Galliford builds regeneration work.
February 2, 2007... Galliford Try underscored its regeneration credentials this week when it announced GBP71m of new business. The group has been awarded a GBP46m contract to redevelop a Grimsby housing estate and a GBP25m affordable housing contract in East...

James Fisher expands nuclear footprint.
February 2, 2007... Marine support services group James Fisher has announced a strategic tie-up with French monitoring systems company Synodys. The company has become Synodys' exclusive UK partner in a move that expands Fisher's radiation measurement capabilities....

Torex Retail shares suspended.
February 2, 2007... The Serious Fraud Office has begun an investigation into Torex Retail. The software company had already suspended its shares after revealing that performance would be "significantly below" forecasts and that debt would be GBP23m higher than...

Hambledon mining on track for gold.
February 2, 2007... Hambledon Mining has raised $16m (GBP8.2m) via a placing of shares at 15p each to fund the acquisition of a new gold property and a metals-processing plant, both in Kazakhstan. The deal adds 600,000 ounces of gold to the company's resource...

Cash holdings rise.
February 2, 2007... There was good news for shares this week when the Bank of England reported that non-bank financial institutions' bank deposits soared by 2.4 per cent in December. Their cash holdings are now equivalent to 21.2 per cent of the market...

Adventis reports upbeat trading.
February 2, 2007... Shares in marketing and advertising specialist Adventis rose by 17 per cent after the company said buoyant market conditions, and a strong performance from recent acquisitions, would see it beat full-year expectations. Adventis has...

Oils well for Ascent Resources.
February 2, 2007... Shares in Ascent Resources jumped 9 per cent to 12p after the company announced that its Anagni well in Italy had encountered an oil reservoir at a depth of 865m. The well will now be re-tested down to a depth of 2,000m with new equipment....

Empyrean Energy falls after share placing.
February 2, 2007... Empyrean Energy has raised GBP5m via a placing of shares at 35p each. Over 6m Empyrean shares changed hands after the news was announced, and the shares dipped by 4.5p to 43.5p as the market digested the discount. The money raised will be used...

Mears chief executive quits.
February 2, 2007... Shares in Mears slipped 9 per cent after the unexpected resignation of chief executive Stuart Black after less than two years in the job. Executive chairman Bob Holt will take over. According to analysts at broker Numis Securities, there were...

Impressive trading at Walker Greenbank.
February 2, 2007... Wallpaper and fabrics manufacturer Walker Greenbank has said that, thanks to strong autumn trading, results for the year just ended will be ahead of market expectations. Chief executive John Sach says that the Harlequin brand has done...

Week Ahead...
February 2, 2007... News Monday 5 february Irish airline Ryanair issues its third-quarter results on Monday. And now that its Aer Lingus bid has lapsed, investor attention will focus, once again, on shareholder returns. Analysts will be particularly...

Vodafone's performance is on a roll.
February 2, 2007... Just for a moment, after Deutsche Telekom issued a profit warning over the weekend, Vodafone investors had something else to worry about other than the company's planned bid for India's Hutchison Essar. But their concern only lasted three...

Who will catch our falling reits?
February 2, 2007... The brave band of UK property companies that adopted real-estate investment trust (Reit) status have had an inauspicious start to life in their new guise. So far, the share prices of the UK's five blue-chip Reits have, on average, fallen by 6.8...

Investors face higher charges.
February 2, 2007... Rather than protecting investors, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has actually made it easier for asset management houses to ramp up the charges on their funds. Open-ended fund managers have to publish maximum charges for their...

New trackers set for British shores.
February 2, 2007... The exchange-traded fund (ETF) market in Britain is likely to grow significantly with a wave of new issuance from non-UK domiciled providers. This should open up a range of new styles and strategies to private investors, who have thus far been...

LONDON SCOTTISH BANK (LSB).
February 2, 2007... The publication of full-year results by London Scottish Bank clears the way for its larger rival, and would-be bidder, Cattles to get on with due diligence. And the results that London Scottish has announced are a good advert for the...

TRAVELZEST (TVZ).
February 2, 2007... Travelzest has been buying companies at a rapid rate. It made three acquisitions in the year to last October, and has made three more since the year-end. The aim is to build a group that can take advantage of what chief executive Chris...

CITY OF LONDON INVESTMENT (CLIG).
February 2, 2007... Emerging markets fund manager City of London experienced another period of index-beating performance, which meant a number of institutional clients from the US - where it generates over 90 per cent of turnover - had to take profits to stop...

BEALE (BAE).
February 2, 2007... Beale's like-for-like gross sales figure (which includes concessions sales) decreased by 0.1 per cent, which is actually not bad given the tough retail climate. More disappointing, however, was the 4.3 per cent fall in gross sales in the 11...

MONSOON (MSN).
February 2, 2007... Monsoon, owner of the Monsoon and Accessorize chains, saw like-for-like sales fall by a dismal 6 per cent. Monsoon was not alone, however, in this kind of performance, as many of the clothing retailers were hit by an unseasonably warm autumn....

CPL RESOURCES (CPS).
February 2, 2007... CPL Resources, Ireland's leading recruitment firm, continues to reap the benefits of the buoyant economic conditions in its home market. And it is not only the thriving job market that is propelling profits ever higher. The group's conversion...

DOBBIES GARDEN CENTRES (DGC).
February 2, 2007... Dobbies' results were overshadowed by continuing speculation that Scottish entrepreneur Tom Hunter, who took Wyevale Garden Centres private in June 2006 and currently holds almost 8 per cent of Dobbies' share capital, may be seeking to bid for...

FILTRONIC (FTC).
February 2, 2007... Filtronic's shares fell on the back of these results because the company lost more money than expected - and because it seems in no hurry to return the proceeds to shareholders of October's sale of the wireless infrastructure division to US...

KENSINGTON (KGN).
February 2, 2007... As sub-prime lender Kensington flagged in its November trading statement, the decision not to chase higher-risk business has meant losing out to competition from other banks entering the market. So, while the group wrote GBP4.1bn of new...

The rate rule.
February 2, 2007... How high could interest rates go? We don't need 'judgment' to answer this. There's a simple rule that's guided us in the past: the Taylor rule, named after Stanford University's John B Taylor. This rule says that short-term interest rates...

Carry on trading.
February 2, 2007... In December, I was asked to write about our outlook for 2007. Although never an easy task, the area I thought would attract the most investor interest in the first half of this year was currencies and, to a lesser degree, the precarious nature...

Tata wins Corus war.
February 2, 2007... Tata Steel of India finally won its takeover battle for Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus against Brazilian rival CSN. Tata's 608p-a-share offer emerged victorious at the conclusion of an auction mandated by the Takeover Panel. The bid values...

Dawnay Day faces revaluation uplift.
February 2, 2007... Investors that backed the floats of closed-end property funds when they began to flood on to Aim in early 2005 have yet to see much benefit in the share prices. However, this could change in 2007 as many funds have bought into rising markets...

Tissue Science begins to perk up.
February 2, 2007... Shares in Tissue Science Laboratories have been sickly, but rose 4 per cent to 86p after the tissue-replacement specialist issued an upbeat trading statement. Full-year sales were up 5 per cent on 2005, even though sales through partners...

Warner bids for JS Real Estate.
February 2, 2007... There's something peculiar about Warner Estate's recommended 700p cash offer for JS Real Estate: it was 10 per cent below JS's pre-offer share price. Still, the offer has already received 56 per cent acceptances. Maybe that's not so surprising...

Helius Energy takes off.
February 2, 2007... Britain's first biomass power generation company, Helius Energy, floated at 26p on Wednesday and its shares jumped 53 per cent to 40p in early trading. The company, which raised GBP2m, has a site on the Humber estuary to build a 65MW...

Acambis' Indian boost.
February 2, 2007... Shares in Acambis rose 2 per cent after the vaccine developer announced that it has begun trials of its paediatric vaccine for Japanese encephalitis in India. Childhood encephalitis is a major problem in Asia, and Acambis has a distribution...

Corin's hip hooray.
February 2, 2007... Corin's hip-resurfacing product, Cormet, is due to be reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration on 22 February. Mike Mitchell, analyst at Kepler Teather & Greenwood Merrion, admits the regulator's decision is "impossible to second-guess",...

Mortgage approvals' market fall.
February 2, 2007... There are signs of a slowdown in the housing market. The Bank of England reported this week that mortgage approvals fell 12.4 per cent in December to 113,000. However, approvals are still high enough to point to rising house prices. The...

Inflation fears for gilt market.
February 2, 2007... The gilt market is still fretting about inflation. The break-even inflation rate between 10-year conventional and index-linked gilts is close to a seven-year high, now at 3.54 per cent. However, since the Bank of England was made...

Is shell willing to risk us sanctions?
February 2, 2007... Shell's planned investment in a US$10bn (GBP5.1bn) Iranian liquefied natural gas (LNG) project could now lead to US sanctions. But, given historical reluctance to enforce sanctions against multinationals, Shell may reckon the risk is worthwhile...

Egg on Pru's face.
February 2, 2007... Prudential has surprised the City with plans to sell struggling internet bank Egg to Citibank for GBP575m. The move comes just a year after Prudential's chief executive, Mark Tucker, said that Egg was no longer for sale. And it now values Egg...

Competition puts debt companies under pressure.
February 2, 2007... The debt-advisory sector has had a week to forget. Shares prices collapsed, as two of the leading players - Debt Free Direct and Accuma - released profit warnings and another, Debtmatters, was less than bullish about its prospects. Accuma's...

Prime numbers.
February 2, 2007... Profit-taking may have weighed on Reit shares since the start of the year, but this is not the only reason behind January's lacklustre performance. Worries about UK property valuations have also taken their toll on Reit share prices. UK...

Don't be a mailshot mug.
February 2, 2007... Forget about 'chuggers', the aggressive 'charity muggers' who accost pedestrians in most high streets throughout the country. At least they are overt, they have identity cards, and the charities they represent are generally well-known. But what...

Green could clean up.
February 2, 2007... The past year has seen both governments and companies begin to wake up to the threat presented by climate change. This is obviously good news for most of the world's inhabitants. But it is also good news for the small but growing number of...

AMINO TECHNOLOGIES (AMO).
February 2, 2007... October's profit warning hit Amino's shares hard and, although the share price has started recovering, there's been no grand strategic change to reassure investors. Amino is still well positioned to catch the broadband-TV wave, but the...

JELF (JLF).
February 2, 2007... South-West-based Jelf is enjoying rapid growth thanks to a clear strategy of acting as the buyer in what chief executive Alex Always describes as "a cottage industry going through a considerable amount of consolidation". Alongside these...

SITESERV (SSV).
February 2, 2007... Siteserv, which provides services to the Irish construction industry, has posted its first set of results since November's flotation on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) and the Irish IEX market. The group plans to expand both organically...

COLEFAX (CFX).
February 2, 2007... Helped by buoyant conditions in the mid-to-upper end of the UK property market, as well as a recovering European market, Colefax has weathered a US sales slowdown and the weak-ening US dollar. Sales growth in the US did slow from 8 per cent...

SurfControl (SRF).
February 2, 2007... Rampant merger activity in the internet security sector has cut the number of security technology vendors by 35 per cent since the beginning of 2005. And SurfControl might soon follow the crowd, declaring that it entered into takeover talks in...

PORVAIR (PRV).
February 2, 2007... Porvair's portfolio of products is coming of age. The filtration specialist is regularly shipping - albeit it modest - amounts of its bipolar fuel plates, and recently delivered another set of filters as part of its $20m deal with SG...

PHYNOVA (PYN).
February 2, 2007... "It's been a busy year," says chief executive Robert Miller. Indeed, since Phynova joined Aim in February 2006 it has won US approval to start clinical studies of PYN17, for hepatitis C symptoms, snapped up a 45 per cent stake in Chinese...

SANCTUARY (SGP).
February 2, 2007... Sanctuary is a group that is trying to turn itself around. There have been sweeping management and board changes, with a new chief executive, chairman and finance director, along with three new non-executive directors, as the company seeks to...

RED SQUARED (RDS).
February 2, 2007... A good clue to a company's future profitability if it's been loss-making is when it recognises a deferred tax asset (losses) and, under the latest accounting rules, they can appear on a profit-and-loss (p&l) account without ever lurking on a...

WYNNSTAY (WYN).
February 2, 2007... Wynnstay Group supplies farmers with a wide range of feed and fertiliser products either side of the Welsh border. In number terms, the majority of its customers are Welsh, but the big buyers are land barons in Shropshire and Cheshire. And,...

SUMUS (SUMU).
February 2, 2007... It's time investors looked again at the potential attractions of independent financial advisers (IFAs) - a modest sized sub-sector of the finance industry. For years, IFAs' main claim to fame was that they advised clients how to make money as...

JARVIS SECURITIES (JIM).
February 2, 2007... Jarvis Securities is the holding company for Jarvis Investment Management, which is an execution-only stockbroker and offers tailored financial administration to various financial institutions, including other stockbrokers, merchant banks and...

FLETCHER KING (FLK).
February 2, 2007... A strong set of interim figures from Fletcher King has put the London-based property manager well on course to grow full-year profits by a third to GBP0.8m. Activity within the commercial property sector accelerated in 2006, and the...

WOLFSON MICROELECTRONICS (WLF).
February 2, 2007... Audio chip specialist Wolfson just squeezed into the lower end of 2006's revenue guidance, but that didn't stop investors from punishing its shares once again. First-quarter revenue guidance for 2007 was well below forecasts at $37m-$42m due to...