Auto Trader IPO could value company at £2.5bn March 9, 2015 Used-car website Auto Trader could be valued at up to £2.5bn when the company floats on the London Stock Exchange this month. The company announced plans to float at the end of last month with a valuation expected to reach just £2bn. Auto Trader, which operates Britain’s leading website for buying and selling new and used [...]
CRH share price dives as doubts of Holcim-Lafarge merger hit Irish firm March 9, 2015 Shares in Irish building supplies company CRH plummeted yesterday amid reports that a merger between Swiss cement maker Holcim and its French counterpart Lafarge could fall apart. The fears arose after Holcim’s largest stakeholder, Thomas Schmidheiny, who owns about 20 per cent of the company, demanded a better deal, according to Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung. [...]
Lord Adair Turner finds something useful to do March 9, 2015 The man who described some banking as socially useless gets a new job – with a bank. It is not unfair to say that Lord Adair Turner has not always been a friend to banks. Turner was a non-executive director at Standard Chartered in the boom years before the crash, and an executive at Merrill [...]
General Motors’ activist investor succeeds in share buyback battle March 9, 2015 GENERAL Motors (GM) announced a $5bn (£3.3bn) a share buyback yesterday, ending a two-month standoff with activist investor Harry J. Wilson. The Detroit car giant came close to collapse in 2009 as the financial crisis took hold, and was forced to file for bankruptcy, relying on a $51bn US government bailout. But the company has [...]
Pizza Express takes a slice out of home market March 9, 2015 Pizza Express yesterday reported strong half-year trading with like-for-like sales ahead by 6.8 per cent in the 28 week period to 11 January 2015. Chief executive Richard Hodgson said the restaurant chain’s strong performance is down to new openings, continuous innovation and a record Christmas trading period, which saw like-forlike growth of 11.2 per cent [...]
Steve Easterbrook sees problems stack up on his plate at McDonald’s March 9, 2015 Fast-food giant McDonald’s yesterday revealed that customers were “lovin’ it” a lot less after unveiling another slide in worldwide sales, for the ninth month in a row. Worldwide sales fell 1.7 per cent, where analysts polled by Consensus Metrix had been expecting a 0.3 per cent decline. In the US, sales at restaurants open at [...]
WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell slams critics of his pay deals March 9, 2015 WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell hit back at criticism that his remuneration was excessive yesterday, saying that if you personally risked investing in and building a business from scratch to the global leadership position in its sector it would be only natural to be rewarded for it Sorrell, who saw off a shareholder revolt over [...]
Coffee-to-go speculation at Tesco as another top executive departs March 9, 2015 TESCO yesterday lost another senior executive after the man in charge of its in-store dining, Michael Holmes, stepped down. Holmes served as the director of a number of Tesco’s businesses, including restaurant chain Giraffe, coffee shop Harris + Hoole, in-store restaurant Decks and Tesco’s Euphorium bakeries. The exit follows a string of departures that have [...]
Cobbold is back on board after two month absence from UBM March 9, 2015 TIM COBBOLD was back at the helm of UBM yesterday after his absence from the events group left the company rudderless since January. The chief executive has taken the past two months off due to an unspecified operation. However, the timing was less than ideal as it coincided with the absence of the company chairman [...]
Alcoa buys RTI International Metals in bid to boost aerospace arm March 9, 2015 US metal manufacturer Alcoa is to pay $1.3bn (£860m) for RTI International Metals, in a stock-for-stock deal with an enterprise value of $1.5bn. Alcoa, which is best known as an aluminium producer, said yesterday that the deal will boost its aerospace business. RTI specialises in titanium and products and services for the commercial aerospace, defence, [...]