London afternoon: Hard going for Footsie

1st Mar 2011 14:53

It's proving a struggle in London with not long to go until the close, as Wall Street fails to inject much excitement and miners either see gains trimmed or disappear completely.Aerospace and vehicles engineer GKN has few friends. It bounced back into the black last year as all divisions bar aerospace saw good sales growth. Profits came in at £345m in 2010, a near £400m swing from losses of £54m the previous year, while sales rose by 20% to £5.1bn and by 22% on an underlying basis. Analysts at RBS thought the outlook was quite positive, but probably broadly in line with consensus expectations. The shares have doubled since last July.Bunzl is also finding it tough today despite Monday's better than expected results. RBS still has some concerns over growth prospects in the two largest markets.There's better news at Capita - the best performer in the FTSE 100 - after the outsourcing group said it was in talks with Zurich about performing some administrative tasks for the insurer in the UK and supporting some of its European administrative operations.It's a former FTSE 250 constituent HMV that's making the headlines though. Robert Swannell has stepped down as chairman after the CD and computer games retailer issued another profits warning and admitted it will probably breach some of its loan covenants. The former investment banker, who took the chairman's seat at Marks & Spencer just two months ago, is finding it impossible to keep up both jobs given the "increasing time requirements" of the role at HMV. In the FTSE 250 itself, speciality chemicals group Elementis moves higher after reporting a sharp rise in sales and profits for the year to 31 December. "The positive momentum and market demand we have experienced in 2010 has continued into the early part of 2011," said the company, whose products are used in inks, plastics and other applications. Full year numbers from events and publishing group United Business Media looked harmless enough, but investors are spooked, sending the shares down 10%. Adjusted profit before tax fell 5.3% to £156.4m, although a 4.5% increase in revenue at constant currency to £889.2m was better than expected. Underlying revenue grew 5.6%, up from 2.1% for the nine months.Business has remained "challenging" since the company issued its last warning in January and profit before tax and exceptional items for the year to April is now expected to be "moderately below" the £45m forecast by analysts.Turning to bigger companies, banking giant Barclays is to buy the UK credit card assets of Egg, the online bank owned by Citigroup. The acquired business has around 1.15m credit card accounts with some £2.3bn of gross receivables. Record gold and silver production coupled with soaring metal prices more than doubled Mexican miner Fresnillo's profits last year to over $1bn. Pre-tax profits in 2010 soared from $457m to $1.02bn on revenues of $1.47bn, up 73% on an adjusted basis. "By 2018, Fresnillo will be able to produce 65m ounces of silver and over 400,000 ounces of gold annually," chairman Alberto Baillères said.Valve and actuators group Rotork delivered record revenue and profit in 2010, with all three of its divisions making progress. Revenue rose 7.6%, or 6.5% to £380.6m in 2010 from £353.5m in 2009. The market had been expecting sales of £374.5m. Despite competition from firms using talking meerkats and comedy opera singers to advertise their products, Moneysupermarket.com saw improving trends in 2010 in all four of its main divisions.Financial Times and Penguin books publisher Pearson has frozen Libya's stake in the company, which is bigger than the company first thought. "Having taken legal advice regarding its obligations under the order, Pearson considers that the ordinary shares in the company which are held by or on behalf of the LIA are subject to the order and are therefore effectively frozen," Pearson said.Sticking with the Libyan theme, the coalition government has stopped De La Rue from exporting £900m of dinars to Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya. An export control order slapped on the shipment by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills makes it a criminal offence to go ahead with the deal.Another clothing company has reported the impact of higher commodity prices. Cashmere and home furnishings group Dawson International said results for the year to 1 January were held back by rising cashmere and cotton prices. Revenues were up to £65.7m from £64.7m the previous year, but pre-exceptional operating profit from continuing businesses fell to £0.8m from £2.2m, which the company says "reflects margin impact of raw material price increases."