Below are the key headlines from today’s updated papers, featuring the Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail & more - see the full Press section here.
Shore Capital leaps into broking Premier League with Stockdale deal. Shore Capital Group Ltd. (SGR) jumped into the top tier of London stockbrokers on Wednesday after snapping up rival Stockdale Securities in a £9 million deal. The tie-up, outlined last month, makes Shore the fourth largest broker by UK-listed clients behind Numis, JP Morgan Cazenove and Peel Hunt. Shore will pay £4 million up front and up to £4.9 million depending on performance targets. The Stockdale brand will disappear. A total of 41 employees will move to Shore, which will take on extra office space to accommodate the new staff. “We always said if the right thing came along we’d look at it,” said Shore co-chief executive Simon Fine. “The combination will let us be strong in a perhaps more challenging market. There’s a lot of macro stuff going on to contend with. We’ve all been around long enough to know you have to adapt to these type of environments.”
InterContinental Hotels Group targets wealthy customers with £233m acquisition. Holiday Inn-owner InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) efforts to attract more affluent customers were boosted on Wednesday as it agreed a $300 million (£232.6 million) purchase of a luxury resorts operator. FTSE 100 firm IHG said it has inked a deal to buy Bangkok-headquartered Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas from US investment group Pegasus Capital Advisors. The transaction includes brands and operating companies behind 16 upmarket hotels. IHG will now run sites such as the Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives, where double rooms start at £953.29 a night. Other locations include Yao Noi in Thailand, Zighy Bay in Oman and Portugal’s Douro Valley. IHG’s Keith Barr, who became chief executive in 2017, said Six Senses “is an outstanding brand in the top tier of luxury and one we’ve admired for some time”.
The boss of Dunelm Group (DNLM) is banking on Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield to boost sales at the homewares chain. Chief executive Nick Wilkinson on Wednesday said “there’s room to become more national” and attract a new wave of younger customers with help from sponsorships such as ITV’s This Morning show. Although Dunelm is spending £4 million more on its marketing efforts this year, Wilkinson insisted the “overall costs are not that high”. The firm defied the retail doom and gloom as pre-tax profits rose £10 million to £70 million for the half year to December 29, on sales of £551.8 million, up 1.2%. Its same-store sales increased by 3.8% and sales of velvet chairs and lamps adorned with llamas were strong. Online orders rose 35.8%.
Construction firm Galliford Try shrugs off Brexit jitters. Clients are delaying or cancelling building work due to Brexit jitters, construction firm Galliford Try (GFRD) said on Wednesday. Although the firm has already secured the lion’s share of its work for this year, the “macro-uncertainty” is unsettling some customers, the firm’s chief executive Peter Truscott said. Galliford is being “picky and choosy” over its work and saw revenues slide 5% to £1.42 billion in the six months to December. But profits were up 4% to £84.2 million, before an increased £26 million bill for completing the delayed Aberdeen Northern Relief Road, a contract which helped send Carillion under last year. Galliford tapped shareholders for cash to cover the outlay
Whitbread (WTB) , the owner of Premier Inn, has announced a share buy-back of £2billion using the proceeds from the sale of Costa Coffee last month. The group, which sold Costa to Coca-Cola for £3.9billion last month, has shifted focus completely to its hotels business. The group’s share buy-back plans mean it will be returning £2.5billion in total to investors, having already kicked off a £500million programme in January. It also said it plans to ramp up cost savings by a further £220million.
The boss of Smurfit Kappa Group (SKG) hit out against the crisis-hit regime of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro after its exile from the country sent it plunging into the red for the full year. The cardboard box maker wrote off its Venezuelan operations after 65 years in September after they were seized by the Government following months of harassment. Tony Smurfit, grandson of the company’s founder Jefferson Smurfit, said: “I’m old enough to remember when Venezuela was by far the best country in Latin America and it shows you that that kind of socialism is absolutely terrible and we’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen here.”
Royal Dutch Shell ‘B’ (RDSB) will join forces with renewable energy developers to build an €18m (£15.7m) floating wind project off the coast of Norway by next year. The Anglo-Dutch fossil fuel giant will take a majority stake in the development company that hopes to prove that the cost of floating wind projects could fall significantly using innovating approaches. Shell has increased its share of the project from an initial one third stake to almost two thirds, alongside German renewables company Innogy and Denmark’s Stiesdal Offshore Technologies. The project company plans to test the new wind power technology six miles off the Norwegian coast by 2020.