WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING
FINANCIAL TIMES
ICBC SAYS IT WILL RAISE £4.26BN
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest lender by market value, said yesterday it planned to raise up to £4.26bn in a rights issue in Hong Kong and Shanghai to shore up its capital base. The rights issue is the latest in a string of fundraising plans from China’s state-controlled banks, which intend to raise tens of billions of dollars in the coming months to strengthen their balance sheets after an unprecedented lending spree last year.
SPRINT REPORTS NARROW LOSS
Strong demand for HTC’s Evo smartphone helped Sprint Nextel, the third largest US mobile network operator, add wireless subscribers for the first time in three years and report a narrower than expected loss in the second quarter.
DANONE SELLS STAKE IN JUICE MAKER
Danone has sold its stake in a Chinese juice maker for €200m ($166m), less than half the amount Coca-Cola was prepared to pay in a deal that collapsed last year. The value of Danone’s stake in Huiyuan Juice Group has fallen sharply since the Chinese government blocked Coca-Cola from taking over the country’s largest privately owned juice producer.
SAP RAISES ITS SALES OUTLOOK
SAP slightly raised its sales outlook for the full year, in a move that failed to achieve market hopes for a bolder forecast from the German business software maker. The world’s largest business software group by sales said it expected revenues from software and related services to climb by six to eight per cent at constant currencies in the full year, at the upper end of the previously forecast range of four to eight per cent.
THE TIMES
BIG FOUR BANKS PASS STRESS TEST
Britain’s big four high street banks would together write off £119bn — equivalent to more than five years’ profits — if they encountered a recession and sovereign debt crisis of the scale and severity described last week in the Europe-wide stress test. While British banks passed that test comfortably, with their capital levels judged more than adequate to cushion such losses, the numbers illustrate the huge sums at risk from significant adverse events.
WORLD CUP BOOSTS REXAM PROFIT
Rexam, the world’s largest beverage can maker, scored a 47 per cent rise in pre-tax profits thanks partly to speciality cans. A range of World Cup promotional beer cans featuring the likes of Lionel Messi and Kaka played to Rexam’s advantage in the first six months of the year.
The Daily Telegraph
SKY TO LAUNCH 3D CHANNEL
Sky will fully launch its 3D channel on October 1 but will only be available to those with the Sky+ HD package and a 3D-enabled television. The station has been live since 3 April, but other than six Premier League football matches, has only been playing promotional snippets of 3D footage.
OIL RIG SAFETY CHECKS TO START
UK safety officials have begun a crackdown on elderly North Sea oil and gas rigs, at the same time as it emerged a clutch of US federal regulators are preparing to begin a formal investigation into whether BP and its partners drilling the ill-fated Macondo well contributed to the Gulf of Mexico spill. The two separate moves – on either side of the Atlantic – highlight the seriousness with which regulators are treating the industry since the well’s 20 April explosion.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
ADOBE TO BUY DAY SOFTWARE
Adobe said yesterday it has signed a definitive agreement to launch a public tender offer to acquire all of Day Software’s shares for about $240m (£185m) in, a move that highlights the expansion of its portfolio of web content-management offerings. Adobe will acquire the shares at 139 Swiss francs each in cash, said Rob Tarkoff, who runs Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions group.
RUSSIA’S DST PLANS IPO
Russian Internet firm Digital Sky Technologies has hired investment banks to organize an initial public offering in 2011, a person familiar with the plans said. DST chose Goldman Sachs, which has a stake in the company, and two other investment banks for an IPO on a global stock exchange, most likely in London.