News

Your daily news update straight from the City PM newsroom in London

RUNNING FOR COVER

July 28, 2009

US media giant Viacom yesterday said second quarter profit tumbled 32 per cent as revenues slumped due to a weak advertising market, slower video game sales and lower box office results. The group, owner of Paramount Studios, which produced the Transformers films (above), earned $277m compared with $407m for the same period a year earlier. [...]
Bad debt fear hits Deutsche despite profit

July 28, 2009

DEUTSCHE Bank posted a 67 per cent rise in second-quarter profits yesterday as it was boosted by a barnstorming performance from its investment banking operations, but saw its shares fall on fears of mounting bad loans. Net profit for the quarter reached €1.1bn (£948m) compared to €645m in the equivalent quarter of 2008, thanks largely [...]
How the seasons affect our beer drinking habits

July 28, 2009

AS it gets warmer, beers get more popular. Our BrandIndex scores show a seasonal pattern climaxing around mid-August and lowest in February. But Guinness is an exception. The first graph shows Guinness relative to the basket of scores, and it moves in the exact opposite way to other brews. I wouldn’t want to be misleading: [...]
Jobless rise hits retailers

July 28, 2009

RETAIL sales fell faster than expected in July as consumers tightened their belts in the face of rising unemployment, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said yesterday. The CBI’s monthly distributive trades survey sales balance was -15 per cent this month, an improvement on -17 per cent in June, but worse than the -12 per [...]
A STITCH IN TIME

July 28, 2009

ADMINISTRATORS for prestigious Mayfair tailor Douglas Hayward – famous for making suits for 1960s stars including Michael Caine and Richard Burton – has secured Mount Street Tailors as a buyer for the long-established business. The sale has safeguarded the jobs of all Hayward employees and preserved the establishment which was set up more than 40-years [...]
SAB Miller to face protest

July 28, 2009

Global brewer SAB Miller was yesterday hit with an alert by shareholder advisory group Pirc , urging investors to reject the company’s “excessive” levels of executive pay at this Friday’s annual meeting. Pirc yesterday said bonuses of 500 per cent of base salary were too high, while the minimum performance targets that are attached to [...]
Whitbread dumps more pubs

July 28, 2009

Leisure operator Whitbread yesterday placed four more high-quality pubs on the market as part of plans to restructure its estate. The company, which owns the Premier Inn and Brewers Fayre brands, is disposing of the pubs as part of plans to focus on properties where a Premier Inn can be built on the same site. [...]
Google sells AOL stake at a loss

July 28, 2009

Google has sold its five per cent stake in AOL back to Time Warner for $283m – a fraction of the $1bn it was worth at the time of purchase, less than four years ago. Time Warner bought back the stake on 8 July, according to a filing by AOL with the US Securities and [...]
Charles Stanley revenues up

July 28, 2009

CHARLES Stanley delivered a strong performance in its first quarter, the stockbroker said yesterday, reporting revenues up 2.4 per cent and a 10 per cent increase in funds under management. In a trading statement, the bank said income across its private clients, financial services and securities operations was resilient. Funds under management in the firm’s [...]
Vodafone: T-Mobile UK sale is not imminent

July 28, 2009

A Sale of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK subsidiary to Vodafone is not imminent, Vodafone said yesterday. At a gloomy annual meeting, overshadowed by economic and performance concerns, Vodafone chairman Sir John Bond said he could not comment further on T-Mobile UK. But he said he did not think the sale of Britain’s second-smallest mobile operator [...]