Quindell suffers – despite profits quadrupling August 21, 2014 Quindell, the Aim-listed insurance firm whose shares plummeted 60 per cent in April following a scathing blog post by US short seller Gotham City Research, came out fighting yesterday when it reported an 119 per cent increase in half-year revenue. Despite the bullish results, Quindell’s shares still fell 12.4 per cent following the update to [...]
Quindell bosses may have delivered but trust is lost – Bottom Line August 21, 2014 Lots of reasons were bandied about yesterday as to why, despite an overwhelmingly positive set of results, Quindell’s shares were still hurting. One explanation put out by chairman Rob Terry was that short sellers were at work once again – indeed the City regulator currently records around 7.3 per cent of Quindell’s stock being shorted [...]
Sportech hit by bad US weather August 21, 2014 BETTING operator Sportech yesterday announced that the double whammy of extreme US weather and a strong pound, had hit first-half earnings. The group posted a 3.3 per cent fall in revenues to £52.6m on the back of 280 cancelled US horse race meetings during the six months to 30 June. “It is disappointing that the [...]
Ebay share price jumps as online retailer mulls PayPal spinoff August 21, 2014 Ebay is reportedly considering a spinoff of PayPal, its fast-growing online payments division, as early as next year. Shares of the online retailer jumped 4.6 per cent yesterday to $55.89 in New York. Ebay told its potential candidates for the position of PayPal chief executive, a post that former boss David Marcus left in June, [...]
Carlsberg share price dips as Russian tension takes the fizz out of profits August 20, 2014 Copenhagen-listed brewer Carlsberg saw its shares fall as much as 4.6 per cent during trading yesterday after warning its 2014 profit would drop due to the deteriorating Russian market. The Danish firm, which generates 35 per cent of its profits from Russia, said it now expected operating profit to fall by low- to mid-single digit [...]
Bookie boss in share windfall August 20, 2014 JUST a week after Ladbrokes posted a 50 per cent slump in profit during the first half of 2014, in spite of the World Cup betting, its chief executive Richard Glynn received a £1m share award yesterday based on the bookie’s performance. Glynn, who has struggled to turn around its online offering, is in line [...]
Snapchat eyes self-destructing news business August 20, 2014 Ephemeral photo messaging app Snapchat could soon offer more than just pictures and videos as it is reportedly in talks with a host of media companies and advertisers about offering perishable news and ads to users. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the so-called Snapchat Discovery service will let users read news [...]
Nokia’s Halbherr out of Here as Finnish firm loses key executive August 20, 2014 NOKIA lost a key member of its senior management team yesterday, as the Finnish firm continues to realign its strategy following the €5.44bn (£4.3bn) sale of its mobile phone division to Microsoft. Michael Halbherr, the head of the Nokia’s navigation unit Here, will leave the company on 1 September to pursue his own entrepreneurial interests, [...]
Shazam counts 100m monthly mobile users, 500m app downloads August 20, 2014 Music recognition service Shazam now has more than 100m mobile monthly active users, a 34 per cent jump year-on-year, the London-based tech firm said yesterday. The Shazam app had been downloaded more than 500m times and the company said it was adding users at a rate of 13m per month. “Shazam is evolving from being [...]
Flappy Bird founder Nguyen Dong takes off with Swing Copters sequel August 19, 2014 The creator of Flappy Bird, the smartphone phenomenon that generated over $50,000 a day in early 2014 before it was pulled from Apple’s App Store after just nine months, is set to return tomorrow with his next game. Vietnamese developer Nguyen Dong, who shut down Flappy Bird after notching up 50m players and finding the [...]
