Clontarf Share News (CLON)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Home improvement retailer Kingfisher is the biggest decliner on the FTSE 100 Thursday after it warned that it expects tougher trading in the second quarter against stronger comparatives, and said its margins had been hit by discounts in its kitchens and bathrooms department.

The B&Q and Screwfix parent reported a strong increase in its retail profit in the first quarter, as better spring weather sent customers scurrying for barbecue products and helped trading in the UK.

However, Chief Executive Ian Cheshire warned that the weather effect would reverse in the second quarter, meaning trading would be a lot tougher, while gross margins were also under pressure as it pushed kitchen and bathroom sales with discounts and sold more lower-margin outdoor products.

The company last year experienced a tough first quarter as a cold spring kept customers out of its stores until the second quarter.

Shares in Homebase owner Home Retail Group also fell on the back of Kingfisher's warning.

Man Group is the top gainer on the FTSE 250 after confirming that it is in talks to buy quantitative hedge fund specialist Numeric Holdings LLC.

UK stocks are trading modestly higher, although volumes remain light with half of Europe closed for the Ascension Day holiday and no economic data due until the afternoon, when revised US first quarter GDP numbers are released at 1330 BST. US stocks are set to open a little firmer.

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FTSE 100: up 0.4% at 6,875.86
FTSE 250: up 0.5% at 16,008.63
AIM ALL-SHARE: up 0.4% at 808.40
GBP-USD: up at 1.6718
EUR-USD: up at 1.3619
GOLD: down at USD1,253.08 an ounce
OIL (Brent): up at USD110.34 a barrel
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Top UK Corporate News
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Hedge fund manager Man Group confirmed it is in talks to buy quantitative hedge fund specialist Numeric Holdings LLC. In a statement, the company said the talks are continuing and may or may not lead to a deal. Numeric is currently owned by its own senior partners, and private equity firm TA Associates, which has a minority stake it bought back in 2004.
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Centrica said British Gas boss Chris Weston is leaving the company to become chief executive of temporary power provider Aggreko, leaving Centrica without its top three executives. The energy supplier said Weston, who runs Centrica's International downstream division and joined the company in 2001, is subject to 12 months notice and a further announcement will be made soon regarding the timing of his departure and who will be his successor.
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BP has asked the US Supreme Court to step in after federal courts in New Orleans lifted an injunction blocking the payment of business claims for economic losses under the settlement that the oil company agreed for victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2012, the Financial Times reports. The newspaper says the company on Wednesday filed a request for the Supreme Court to block disputed compensation awards related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, warning that it faced “staggering” costs “far exceeding the actual injury caused by the spill” if payments were allowed to go ahead.
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Aircraft engine and marine propulsion maker Rolls-Royce Holdings said it has won a deal worth about GBP35 million to design and equip a large offshore support vessel for Norwegian ship owner Island Offshore.
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Severn Trent delivered on its promise to increase its annual dividend by 6.0% after reporting an increase in profit and revenue for the recent full year, driven by a strong performance from its regulated business. The water company posted pretax profit of GBP282.7 million for the financial year ended March 31, as revenue crept up to GBP1.86 billion. It also said revenue for its regulated arm increased 2.2%. It said prices were increased by one percentage point less than November 2012 inflation of 3.0% from April 2013, which gave rise to an increase in revenue of GBP29.8 million. The utility also said a dry summer in 2013 led to higher consumption from metered customers which increased revenue by GBP7.1 million year-on-year.
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Electra Private Equity saw its shares rise after it reported higher net asset value for the first half of its financial year, returns in line with long-term averages and targets, and it said it had made a record level of new investment despite the tough competition in the market. In a statement, the company reported a diluted net asset value per share increase of 5% to 2,914 pence, while the figure including dividends has now made a ten-year annualised return on equity of 14%, in line with its long-term target of 10-15% a year.
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Retail payments and services company Paypoint reported higher pretax profit for its last financial year, as it processed more transactions, cut costs, and as its joint venture parcel collection service with delivery company Yodel started making a profit. The company reported a pretax profit of GBP46.0 million, that increase outperformed the 1.7% rise in revenue to GBP212.2 million, from GBP208.5 million. It said its Collect+ service, which enables online sellers to send and return parcels and buyers to collect parcels from shops that are part of the network, made a GBP1.8 million profit compared with a GBP1.9 million loss the previous year, as transaction volumes grew 76% and revenue rose 92%.
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Online retailer Mysale Group, part owned by the wife of UK retailer Philip Green, became the latest in a long list of retailers that have, or are set to, list in London in 2014, on the day that Saga got off to a steady start on the first day of unconditional dealings in its shares. Mysale was launched in Australia in 2007 and has since expanded to New Zealand, southeast Asia, the US and UK. It is a so-called flash sales retailer - once a customer becomes an "exclusive" member, they get access to member-only fashion sales. It had about 795,000 active members across eleven online sites on May 14, although it had 10.8 million registered members and is adding about 250,000 new members each month.
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AIM MOVERS
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Caza Oil & Gas shares have risen after the petroleum and natural gas company said it received strong results from its Bone Spring drilling programme with the initial test well on its Gramma Ridge Property in Lea County, New Mexico. Fitbug Holdings is also trading higher even though it said its losses widened in 2013, as it continued to invest in its product offering. Shares in Range Resources rose after the hydrocarbon exploration firm said it has received USD12 million in financing through a previously announced subscription agreement with Abraham Ltd, a Hong Kong-based private investor. Sabien Technology Group is a big faller after it warned that it now expects to post a loss of up to about GBP0.3 million for the current financial year, after some orders it had expected to receive were delayed into next year. Contarf Energy shares are also trading lower after the oil and gas exploration company said its pretax loss widened in 2013 as the company, which is currently involved in an ongoing dispute over a licence award in Ghana, was hit by impairment charges and higher administrative expenses.
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Top Economics And General
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Britain needs to start raising interest rates sooner rather than later if it wants to avoid sharp and painful increases in the future, Martin Weale, an external member of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee told the Financial Times in an interview. Weale said he thought even a “gradual” rise in interest rates could see borrowing costs rise by up to one percentage point a year – faster than markets are expecting. He said his definition of a “gradual” rate rise would involve the bank tightening by “no more than” 25 basis points a quarter, while investors are betting on an increase of about 1.8 percentage points over three years. He told the FT he thought “we can wait a bit longer. How long that ‘bit longer’ will be I’m not sure, but the best judgment I can have is that it’s not so urgent it needs doing now.”
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Nick Clegg, leader of Britain's Liberal Democrat party, insisted he will not sack Vince Cable and that the business secretary had had no part in a failed attempt to oust him from the leadership. The deputy prime minister has been under pressure to resign since his party, the junior partner in a coalition government, lost hundreds of local council seats and all bar one of its European Parliament seats in elections last week. But he has refused to step down and on Thursday told LBC radio that he would "absolutely not" sack Cable.
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UK car production grew at the fastest pace in almost two years in April due mostly to introduction of new models and an upturn in demand from Europe, a report from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, SMMT, showed. The number of cars produced rose 21.3% year-on-year to 133,437 units in April, logging the biggest increase since July 2012. In April, cars manufactured for the domestic market rose 20.9% to 26,930. Exports, which accounted for 79.8% of total production, grew 21.4% to 106,507.
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Pro-Western billionaire Petro Poroshenko was confirmed the winner of Ukraine's presidential election with 54.7% of the vote, his predecessor told parliament. Pro-Russian separatists, meanwhile, confirmed that they are holding four international observers detained in eastern Ukraine and said they would release them. Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov said in Kiev that he is arranging all the preparations for Poroshenko's inauguration, which must follow within 15 days of Sunday's election.
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Poroshenko vowed Wednesday to crush the rebellion in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists claimed gains against government troops. "We will end this terror," Poroshenko told the German tabloid Bild. "There is a real war being waged against our country." Poroshenko stressed that he was not giving any orders because he has not yet been inaugurated, but said he was in close contact with the interim government. "I can tell you that the operation has at last really begun," he said, noting that the aim was to capture and prosecute rebel leaders.
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Bank of Japan board member Sayuri Shirai said it will likely take longer than "two years" to achieve the 2% inflation, in order to avoid imposing excessive burdens on firms and households. Speaking at a meeting of business leaders in Okinawa on Thursday, she said the bank should focus on conducting monetary easing with the aim of achieving 2% target in a stable manner with sustainable growth, rather than merely achieving 2% in a specific year and failing to meet it in subsequent years.
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Retail sales in Japan contracted 4.4% on year in April, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said on Thursday - coming in at JPY11.011 trillion. That was shy of forecasts for a contraction of 3.3% following the 11% spike in the previous month. Analysts say that the drop was not unexpected, and it follows the enactment of the sales tax hike at the beginning of the month - as consumers tried to get in major purchases before the tax increase went into effect.
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Nearly a third of the world's population is overweight or obese, according to a study using data from more than 180 countries. The 857 million people that were overweight in 1980 increased to 2.1 billion in 2013 - appreciably faster than the rise in the world's population, according to the study "Global, regional, and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults during 1980-2013." Conducted by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and published in the British journal The Lancet, the study states that the development applies equally to industrial and developing countries. More than half of overweight people live in 10 countries, which include the US, China, India, and Germany, it adds.
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Afternoon Watchlist (all times British Summer Time)
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13:30 US Gross Domestic Product Price Index
13:30 US Initial Jobless Claims
13:30 US Personal Consumption Expenditures Prices
15:00 US Pending Home Sales
15:30 US EIA Natural Gas Storage change
16:00 US EIA Crude Oil Stocks change
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Friday's Key UK Corporate Events
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Caffyns Full Year Results
F&C Private Equity Trust Q1 Results
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Friday's Key Economic Events (all times British Summer Time)
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All Day OPEC meeting
00:05 UK Gfk Consumer Confidence
00:30 Japan National Consumer Price Index
00:30 Japan Tokyo Consumer Price Index
00:30 Japan Overall Household Spending
00:30 Japan Unemployment Rate
00:30 Japan Jobs/applicants ratio
00:50 Japan Industrial Production
02:30 US Fed's George Speech
05:00 Japan Vehicle Production
06:00 Japan Annualized Housing Starts
06:00 Japan Construction Orders
06:00 Japan Housing Starts
07:00 Germany Retail Sales
13:30 US Personal Income
13:30 US Core Personal Consumption Expenditure - Price Index
13:30 US Personal Consumption Expenditures - Price Index
13:30 US Personal Spending
14:45 US Chicago Purchasing Managers' Index
14:55 US Reuters/Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index
19:00 US Fed's Lacker speech
22:00 US FOMC Member Williams speech
22:00 US Philadelphia Fed's Plosser speech

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