London pre-open: Footsie to retake 6,000

1st Mar 2011 07:36

Overnight gains on Wall Street and an improvement in Asia this morning look set to propel London higher first thing Tuesday. News that billionaire investor Warren Buffett is on the lookout for major acquisitions helped push the Dow Jones up 95 points yesterday. The FTSE 100 is expected to react with a 33-point advance in early trade.Over here, CD and computer games retailer HMV has issued another profits warning and begun talks with its banks about a new lending facility as it expects to breach some of its covenant tests when they are next tested. 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.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. "The acquisition of Egg's UK credit card accounts has been priced at a significant discount to gross receivables. Based on current projections, we expect the transaction to exceed the financial return targets set out at our recent results announcement," said finance chief Chris Lucas.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. Gold production jumped 33% to 369,000 ounces, while silver output rose by 2% to 38.6m ounces. " I believe we are on course to meet the ambitious target set out at the time of our initial public offering in 2008: that 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% using constant exchange rates (CER), to £380.6m in 2010 from £353.5m in 2009. The market had been expecting sales of £374.5m.