Coke to invest $3bn in India June 26, 2012 COCA-COLA announced a further $3bn (£1.92bn) in investment in India over the next eight years yesterday as the world’s biggest soft drinks maker seeks to expand in a country where its flagship brand trails rival Pepsi. The investment by Coca-Cola and its bottlers, on top of a $2bn five-year plan announced in November, will hearten [...]
Serco warns that sluggish sales in US will lead to a revenue dip June 26, 2012 OUTSOURCER Serco yesterday gave a downbeat trading update in which it said the US market was sluggish. The company, whose contracts include running prisons and the Docklands light railway, said it expected revenues to dip in the first half before picking up. It said the UK was proving resilient compared with its business across the [...]
Petrofac sunny about profits June 26, 2012 BRITISH oil services company Petrofac said yesterday contracts worth $1.1bn (£705m) were in its pipeline and would soon be signed, giving it confidence on its profit targets for this year and in the longer term. Petrofac, which designs and builds oil and gas infrastructure and also invests with producers in oil fields, said that its [...]
Coryton site sold to Shell June 26, 2012 CORYTON refinery, which was formerly run by now insolvent Petroplus, will be turned into a fuel import terminal after administrator PwC agreed to sell the site to the joint venture of Vopak, Shell and Greenergy. PwC said the new owners will now start “significant reconfiguration of the existing site” in Essex. Energy minister Chris Hendry [...]
Falklands partners with French June 26, 2012 Falkland Oil & Gas yesterday brought in Italian utility Edison as its new partner, bringing in a large, non-British company to help it look for oil in the UK-governed Falkland Islands, where exploration has angered Argentina. The British company said Edison, owned by France’s EDF, would pay around $50m for costs already encountered in exploration [...]
Adecco plans share buyback June 26, 2012 Adecco will buy back up to €400m (£319.5m) of shares from mid-July, the world’s largest staffing company said yesterday. Adecco, which has a market capitalisation of about £4.6bn, said it would fund the share buyback in the debt capital market and was planning to issue bonds in the near future, subject to market conditions. The [...]
Porvair raises profit forecasts June 26, 2012 Filtration and environmental technology firm Porvair yesterday raised its earnings expectations as profits shot up by 48 per cent in the first half of the year. Pre-tax profits at the firm were £2.4m in the six months to 31 May. Porvair expects the coming six months to be helped by a strong order book and [...]
Squeezed middle most affected by falling incomes, figures show June 26, 2012 THE MIDDLE fifth of households experienced the sharpest drop in average incomes according to a recent year’s data published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Disposable incomes flopped by an average of 4.3 per cent for the so called squeezed middle between 2009-10 and 2010-11 – a fall of £1,100 per household. Across [...]
UK heading for time bomb over housing benefit June 26, 2012 LOWER rates of home ownership are set to cost the government an extra £8bn a year in housing benefit, a think-tank said this morning. Once today’s generation of renters retire, there will be 3.45m pensioners claiming housing benefit by 2060, the Strategic Society Centre (SSC) has calculated. In today’s prices, these claimants will cost the [...]
Third month of US home rises… June 26, 2012 US HOUSE prices rose again in April, while consumer confidence dipped further, according to data published yesterday. The S&P/Case-Shiller house price index rose 0.7 per cent in April, marking the third consecutive month of gains. Prices are still down 1.9 per cent on the year, but this beats the 2.6 per cent fall in the [...]
