London open: Bright start for Footsie

22nd Sep 2009 08:46

London's blue chips have made good progress this morning, buoyed by Wall St clawing back some of Monday's early losses in late trading in the US.It is resource stocks that lead the way again. Tullow Oil has recovered from the profit taking of the past two days, while Lonmin and Fresnillo are leading a second-line miners rally. Rio Tinto is also going well after it sold Alcan Composites, part of the Alcan Engineered Products division, to Swiss firm Schweiter Technologies for $349m. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Last week, Rio announced the sale of 56% of the Alcan Engineered Products Cable business to Platinum Equity.Tobacco giant Imperial Tobacco, best known for its Lambert & Butler cigarettes in the UK, said performance in the year to end-September remains in line with management's expectations. The integration of Gauloises and Gitanes maker Altadis is going well, the company said, and is on track to deliver the expected synergies.UK's leading building contractors are mixed after they were landed with heavy fines by the Office of Fair Trading after a four-year investigation into collusion and price-fixing in the building industry. Balfour Beatty, Kier, Carillion, Interserve and Galliford Try were among 103 firms fined. Trainers and tracksuits group JD Sports has raised both first half profits and like for like sales, but warns the outcome for the year will depend on crucial Christmas trade. Profit before tax for the 26 weeks to 1 August rose 11% to £10.1m on revenue up 8.4% to £324m. Like for like sales rose 0.7% and are 'satisfactory' in the six weeks to 12 September, up 0.8%.Education IT specialist RM said trading so far this year has been in line with expectations. As mentioned at the time of its interim results on 11 May, the company expects revenue to grow this year as a result of its participation in numerous Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programmes.Oil production from Emerald Energy's Khurbet East field in Syria has topped 4.5m barrels, The oil exploration firm said current daily gross oil production is about 16,400 barrels per day. Attempts to recover oil from Khurbet East No.7 well proved fruitless. The company had regarded this as a long shot.