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(Alliance News) - The following stocks are the leading risers and fallers within the main London indices on Thursday.
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FTSE 100 - WINNERS
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Ocado Group, up 1.2%. The online grocer said it will build a mini customer fulfilment centre in Bristol to support growth plans of Ocado Retail. The Bristol warehouse will have a capacity for over 30,000 orders per week compared to 85,000 orders per week expected from Ocado's fifth customer fulfilment centre, which is currently being built at Purfleet, Essex. The facility is being built in an existing warehouse, Ocado said, and is expected to go live at the end of 2020 or early 2021, bringing new capacity into operation significantly faster than for purpose-built standard-sized fulfilment centres. The Bristol mini-centre, consisting of a 150,000 square feet warehouse, will be delivered by St Modwen Properties.
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British Land, up 1.2%, Land Securities, up 1.0%. The property companies were raised to overweight from Equal Weight by Morgan Stanley.
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FTSE 100 - LOSERS
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Vodafone, down 3.8%, National Grid, down 2.2%, Severn Trent, down 2.0%. The stocks went ex-dividend meaning new buyers no longer qualify for the latest dividend payout.
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Ashtead Group, down 2.5%. HSBC downgraded the equipment rental company to Hold from Buy.
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Johnson Matthey, down 2.3%. The speciality chemicals company was cut to Underweight from Neutral by JPMorgan. Last week, Johnson Matthey reported an 8% fall in pretax profit for the first half of its financial year ending March, due to problems at a new plant in Poland in the Clean Air unit.
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FTSE 250 - WINNERS
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Virgin Money UK, up 27%. The challenger bank's shares were higher despite making the "difficult" decision to suspend dividend payments in the face of a "resilient" annual performance. Virgin Money will not be returning any cash for its recently ended financial year due to PPI provisions, which amounted to GBP385 million in the fourth quarter. On an underlying basis, pretax profit declined by 7.2% to GBP539 million, which Virgin Money blamed on higher impairments from the adoption of the IFRS9 accounting standard. Net interest income nearly doubled to GBP1.51 billion from GBP851 million, with the net interest margin meeting guidance, coming in at 1.66%. Looking ahead, the firm sees a net interest margin between 1.60% and 1.65% for financial 2020, with underlying operating costs of no more than GBP900 million and a CET1 ratio of around 13%. "Expectations were pitched fairly low heading into today's announcement so the company's solid if unspectacular performance across several metrics has been treated with a sigh of relief. While the lack of a dividend is disappointing, given that many people invest in banks purely for income, it may also be prudent given that Virgin Money faced a big last minute surge in PPI claims and it also incurred larger than expected restructuring costs during the period," said AJ Bell's Russ Mould.
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Vesuvius, up 3.9%. Exane BNP raised the molten metal flow engineer to Outperform from Neutral.
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Pets at Home, up 3.5%. Goldman Sachs upgraded the pet products retailer to Neutral from Sell.
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FTSE 250 - LOSERS
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Playtech, down 5.0%. Morgan Stanley cut the online gambling and sports betting software firm to Underweight from Equal Weight.
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Go-Ahead Group, down 3.5%. The transport operator said its performance in both bus and rail divisions has been mixed. The company said the performance of regional bus operations has been "slightly weaker" than expected in the period from June 30 to November 27. London & International bus continued to perform well, however. The company said its regional bus revenue rose 2.5% for the period, with 0.5% increase in passenger journeys. Meanwhile London & International bus revenue rose 8%, with 4% increase in mileage. In rail, overall expectations remain unchanged with a good performance in the UK offsetting a challenging operational start to two new German contracts.
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OTHER MAIN MARKET AND AIM - WINNERS
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Amigo Holdings, up 18%. The guarantor loans provider reported a positive set of interim results showing a sharp rise in loan book, pushing revenue higher and resulting in increased dividend. In the six months to September 30, Amigo recorded pretax profit of GBP42.3 million, down 13% on the GBP48.4 million reported the year before. Profit was hurt by a 75% increase in total operating expenses, which grew to GBP40.7 million from GBP23.3 million. As a result, the lender's cost-to-income ratio worsened to 20.8% compared to 17.8% the year before. Revenue was up 12% year-on-year at GBP145.4 million from GBP130.1 million. The lender's total number of customers rose 18% to 222,800 from 188,900. Amigo declared an interim dividend of 3.1 pence, more than 65% higher than last year's interim payout of 1.87p.
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By Arvind Bhunjun; arvindbhunjun@alliancenews.com
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