MCS.L Share News (MCS)

LONDON (Alliance News) - The following stocks are the leading risers and fallers within the main London indices on Wednesday.----------FTSE 100 - WINNERS----------Ocado Group, up 5.6% at 1,002.00 pence. Peel Hunt reiterated its Buy rating and nearly tripled its price target on the online grocer, saying it has the potential to become the Microsoft of retail logistics. The stock has surged in value since the start of this year alone, and is up nearly fourfold since the start of 2017 to date. "It doesn't happen very often, but we believe Ocado Solutions has potential to become the 'standard' platform for retail logistics across all sectors as the operating system of retail," said analysts at Peel Hunt. While the company currently focuses on exclusive contracts, the broker said it would advocate a shift in its focus towards becoming "the open industry standard" like the Windows operating system, which has more than 80% market share.Imperial Brands, up 3.0% and British American Tobacco, up 2.6%. Liberum started coverage on the tobacco companies with Buy ratings. BT Group, up 2.2%. Jefferies raised the telecommunications company to Buy from Hold. ----------FTSE 100 - LOSERS----------Berkeley Group, down 4.5%. The housebuilder said it saw a double digit rise on profit for its recently-ended financial year, though revenue fell as residential sales declined. The group reported pretax profit for the year to the end of April of GBP934.9 million, up 15% from GBP812.4 million the year before. This was well above consensus expectations of GBP906 million. This was due to the sale of 3,536 homes, which although lower than 3,905 homes the prior year, had a substantially higher average selling price of GBP715,000 compared to GBP675,000. In addition, Berkeley said that the housing market in the London and South East region has remained subdued, despite UK government interventions, as headwinds including property taxation, mortgage regulation and macro uncertainty continue to constrain conditions. Peers Barratt Developments, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey were down 0.5%, 0.4% and 0.1% respectively.SSE, down 0.5%. RBC downgraded the energy supplier to Sector Perform from Outperform. ----------FTSE 250 - WINNERS----------Sirius Minerals, up 4.5%. The fertiliser producer said it signed a offtake agreement to supply fertiliser product POLY4 to products and services supplier Intercontinental Trade DMCC Dubai. The supply agreement is for seven years starting from first production, and is for volumes of POLY4 increasing to 350,000 tonnes per annum in the fourth year and for exclusive marketing rights to Nigeria. The binding agreement has a pricing system linked to a product benchmark and remains consistent with Sirius' current contract portfolio, it said. Including the supply agreement, the group's peak contracted sales volumes has risen to 4.7 million tonnes per annum from 4.4 million.----------FTSE 250 - LOSERS----------McCarthy & Stone, down 2.9%. Jefferies downgraded the retirement housebuilder to Hold from Buy. On Tuesday, McCarthy & Stone said annual profit would be lower than expected and that its chief executive would retire in August.----------OTHER MAIN MARKET AND AIM - WINNERS----------Severfield, up 5.5%, The steelmaker said its annual results showed "another year of improved performance" as it posted increased revenue and profit. For the financial year ended March 31, the company, which made steel used in The Shard skyscraper in London, posted 22% jump in pretax profit to GBP22.2 million from GBP18.0 million in the comparative period a year ago. Revenue rose 4.6% to GBP274.2 million from GBP262.2 million, mainly due to an increase in order flow and production activity and higher steel prices. Severfield lifted its total dividend to 2.6 pence per share from 2.3p last year, as it declared a final dividend of 1.7p. An additional special dividend of 1.7p was proposed, to deliver shareholders a total annual payout of 4.3p per share.Best of the Best, up 12%. The online competition organiser recorded increased profit in its most recent financial year after it made a number of changes to its business. For the year ended April 30, the company's pretax profit was GBP1.6 million, up 6% from GBP1.5 million the year before. The profit increase was due largely to revenue growth, which climbed to GBP12.9 million from GBP10.8 million, as a result of a new price structure. Best of the Best introduced new prizes and lowered the prices of its competitions; these changes produced more customers and retained old ones, according to the company.----------OTHER MAIN MARKET AND AIM - LOSERS----------MySQUAR, down 14% at 1.3p. The Myanmar-language social media platform announced a fundraising after agreeing a deal to buy MyPay Myanmar Ltd for GBP2.0 million in cash and shares. The company will acquire payments business MyPay Myanmar from MyPay Ltd to develop its smartphone payments systems, which are anticipated to provide "substantial" revenues going forward. It will pay the half of the amount in cash with the other 50% through a share issue. MySQUAR intends to issue 72.5 million shares to MyPay. In addition, the company said it had GBP619,000 in cash as at March 29, with GBP381,000 scheduled for payments. In order to strengthen its financial resources, MySQUAR has also agreed to issue GBP2.2 million in bonds to Atlas Capital Markets in addition to 666,667 warrants awarded over 42.9 million shares with an exercise price of 1.86p. ----------