Namakwa Diamonds strikes out January 5, 2010 Miner Namakwa Diamonds has struck a deal giving the company its first kimberlite mining operation in Lesotho in southern Africa. The group said Namakwa Batla Diamonds, its joint venture with Batla Minerals, the government and Lesotho investors, had secured a mining lease and agreement covering 173 million tonnes of kimberlite in an area of 19.8 [...]
Mitsui plans share placing worth £6bn January 5, 2010 Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG), Japan’s third-largest bank by assets, plans to raise up to 800bn yen (£5.5bn) by issuing new shares to meet stricter capital requirements and for potential acquisitions in Asia, people with knowledge of the matter said. SMFG is the latest big Japanese lender to tap a modest stock rebound for much-needed [...]
BA’s image recovers from threat of strike action January 5, 2010 JOHN Lewis yesterday announced strong Christmas sales – and certainly from the BrandIndex satisfaction scores, it seems that Waitrose customers were satisfied with their Christmas shopping. Graph One shows the scores of six leading supermarkets for the month of December. A PR DISASTER British Airways, meanwhile, had a disastrous December on the PR front. Strikes [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS January 5, 2010 Carrs Milling FinnCap believes the agriculture, engineering, food and travel company has decent value and should return to profit after a disappointing second half last year. Fertiliser sales have been picking up since early december but the flour markets are proving very competitive and will negate some of the gains made by fertiliser. Carlsberg Evolution [...]
Asda ramps up supermarket price war January 5, 2010 ASDA yesterday upped the ante in the supermarket wars by announcing its biggest round of price cuts in a decade. The supermarket said it was slashing the price of one in five of its products by an average of 13 per cent. The move comes after Tesco last week promised customer savings of more than [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS January 5, 2010 Euroclear The settlement firm said yesterday that Tim Howell, the global head of HSBC Securities Services, will become its new chief executive, replacing Pierre Francotte, who announced his decision to step down last year. Howell, 49, also previously held the position of group treasurer at HSBC. He is a chartered accountant, having originally qualified with [...]
Outlook for sterling is getting even grimmer January 5, 2010 BAD noises have been rumbling around sterling for months now, but they got considerably uglier in the past days. The world’s biggest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co (the cutely-acronymed Pimco), announced earlier this week that it is to cut its exposure to UK government bonds. This raises the spectre of other large investors losing [...]
IF YOU’VE LOST CONFIDENCE, GO FOR GOLD January 5, 2010 DIRECTOR OF CURRENCY RESEARCH, GFT PERHAPS the biggest irony of the past decade has been the fact that despite all the new financial products – ETFs, CDOs, CDSs and so on – the best return was earned by the oldest asset of all – gold. At the start of 2000, the yellow metal traded at [...]
Blizzards boost loonie, krone as oil and gas demand soars January 5, 2010 WHILE Londoners struggle to get into the work through the snow, clever forex traders are finding a way to profit from the grim weather. Whenever the winter is cold, the commodity markets get hotter as fuel demand rockets. Demand for natural gas in the United States was above its five-year average at the end of [...]
THE TIPSTER January 5, 2010 THE refusal by Iceland’s president to sign a bill to refund the UK some £2.3bn in savings lost in the Icesave collapse has the potential to heap further pressure on sterling. We’ve seen cable struggling to hold above the 1.6000 level in recent days and assuming there are no hints from the MPC later this [...]
