London pre-open: Wen Jiabao's comments to limit gains

16th Jul 2012 07:30

City sources predict the FTSE 100 will open up four points from Friday's close of 5,666, largely ignoring huge advances seen in US trading on Friday after Chinese stocks took a big hit today. Premier Wen Jiabao sent investor sentiment in the region plunging after saying economic recovery in China is still unstable and the country could be facing hardship for a while yet. Under pressure security solutions firm G4S estimates that it will incur a loss on its Olympics Games contract of £35-50m after failing to provide the number of staff for the event that it had committed to. During the past week, the company has grabbed the headlines after admitting that the size of the workforce would be lower than expected, prompting organisers to call in as many as 3,500 troops from the military.Accountancy software leviathan Sage has been trading broadly in line with expectations since the end of March but is still waiting for the looked-for pick-up in Europe to happen. "The main trends we highlighted at our interim results in May continue to be a feature of our trading performance," said Guy Berruyer, Chief Executive of Sage. Although conditions on the European mainland toughened, the UK and Ireland businesses demonstrated good growth in the quarter, while the North American operations also saw a quarter-on-quarter improvement.Smiths Group, the FTSE 100 technology company, is selling its share of US biometric firm Cross Match Technologies. The disposal of the minority interest in Florida-based Cross Match will raise a total of $77m although of that $8.0m is being put into an escrow account to cover working capital adjustments and to meet any possible legal claims for up to 15 months.