CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS October 25, 2011 Pemberton Capital Advisors The private equity firm has appointed Christopher Higgins as chief operating officer and Sarah Whitehead (pictured) as internal legal council. Prior to joining Pemberton, Higgins was chief adminstration officer of the non-core division of RBS and held a number of management roles in the debt and credit markets businesses of RBS’s global [...]
Finance firms better than rest at slashing pension deficits to zero October 25, 2011 FINANCE firms are sitting on far smaller pension deficits than their peers in other sectors after spending a year right-sizing their schemes, research out today shows. More than half of FTSE 350 financial firms now hold negligible deficits and most could pay their deficits off with just six days of earnings, pensions specialist Hymans Robertson [...]
BHP Billiton still looking to China growth October 25, 2011 BHP BILLITON’S chief commercial officer dismissed speculation that China is facing a downturn yesterday, saying the country could continue to grow at around seven to eight per cent. “Everything we see points to the fact that China, without doing anything extraordinary, can continue to grow at around seven to eight per cent,” Alberto Calderon said [...]
SERCO WINS NEW BORIS BIKE CONTRACT October 25, 2011 Support services firm Serco yesterday signed a £50m agreement to support the expansion of TfL’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme into East London. The contract will run until 2015 and include the design, operation and installation of the scheme in Tower Hamlets, plus new docking stations to serve the Westfield shopping centre in West London. Serco [...]
Bunzl boosted by North America October 25, 2011 British-based business supplies distributor Bunzl said its third-quarter revenue rose as strong growth in its North American and continental European markets outweighed a weaker performance in Britain where economic conditions remain tough. FTSE 100-listed Bunzl, which supplies supermarkets, hospitals and hotels with products ranging from carrier bags to toilet rolls, said yesterday that group revenue [...]
Senior upbeat on 2012 demand October 25, 2011 Senior said yesterday it had not seen any material change in underlying orders since the end of June, despite an uncertain economy, as the engineering company’s most important end market – the commercial aircraft industry – continued to grow. Senior, which designs and manufactures technology components and systems for original equipment producers in aerospace, diesel [...]
Novartis plans further job cuts October 25, 2011 Swiss drugmaker Novartis said yesterday it is slashing 2,000 jobs in Switzerland and the US to keep costs under control in the face of growing price pressures and the strong Swiss franc. The Basel-based group has already cut thousands of jobs and shut several sites, notably in Britain. The latest measures, which affect 1.7 per [...]
Bank lending on mortgages is on the rise October 25, 2011 MORTGAGE lending rose over the twelve months to September, according to figures out yesterday from the British Bankers’ Association, though at a slowing rate. Growth of 1.6 per cent was recorded in net mortgage lending over the last year. Gross mortgage lending came in seven per cent higher in September than a year ago, at £8.4bn. [...]
Can BlackBerry bury the hatchet over outage? October 25, 2011 LAST week I looked at YouGov’s BrandIndex data to see the immediate impact on consumer perception of the outage that caused a blackout of BlackBerry’s email, web and Messenger services. Now two weeks on from the crisis we can return to BrandIndex for signs of recovery. Focusing firstly on buzz, BlackBerry’s dramatic fall does appear [...]
Rising investment income drives fall in UK current account deficit, says ONS October 25, 2011 BRITAIN’S current account deficit narrowed to its smallest in more than three years in the second quarter, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed yesterday. The gap between imports and exports fell to £2.02bn between April and June from £4.12bn in the previous three months. The figure represents just a quarter of analysts’ forecasts for [...]
