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Business - Need to Know

Morning Edition

Good morning. “Lucky George” declares this morning’s Times leader. “An upbeat economic forecaster and the governor of the Bank of England have ridden to the rescue of a chancellor in a tight spot.”

The Daily Telegraph declares the “end of austerity” on its front page. “Borne lucky” says The Sun. At the other end of the political spectrum The Guardian leads on the “chancellor's £27 billion U-turn”.

The headline writers have delivered their verdict on yesterday’s autumn statement. Later today it will be the turn of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The influential think tank will publish its dissection of George Osborne's autumn statement at 1.00pm. Philip Aldrick, our Economics Editor, will be at the IFS briefing. You can follow him on Twitter @PhilAldrick for the latest.

Ahead of that we have plenty of our own analysis of the autumn statement. Alistair Osborne looks at the Office for Budget Responsibility and the “fine art of book balancing” while Oliver Kamm has “unspun” yesterday’s speech.

On the corporate front Helical Bar has announced that Mike Slade is to switch from chief executive to non-executive chairman after decades running the property company. The larger than life tycoon, who boasts that he has called every property crash since the 1970s, says he is delighted that “he will continue to be part of the Helical story”. I fear the corporate governance wonks - that have clashed with Mr Slade on a number of occasions - will be as delighted.

“He is flash, flirtatious, brazen and almost as famous for high spirits as for the property investments from which he made his fortune,” concluded my former colleague Louise Armitstead when she interviewed him for The Sunday Times in 2007.

We'll have a full story shortly on www.thetimes.co.uk/business shortly.

Elsewhere Tesco has announced that it has paid $12 million to settle a US class lawsuit in connection “with the overstatement of commercial income” and we have got strong full year results from SSP Group, the company which runs food outlets at railway stations and airports, with operating profits up 17 per cent. Shares in SSP, which operates the likes of Upper Crust and Caffe Ritazza, have risen sharply since the company floated at 210p in July 2014, closing yesterday at 296p.

Follow me for on Twitter for regular updates throughout the day - @fletcherr - and please do keep sending me any thoughts or observations about The Times business coverage - richard.fletcher@thetimes.co.uk.

Finally, don't forget that US markets are closed for Thanksgiving today.

Have a great day.

Richard Fletcher
Business Editor
The Times
richard.fletcher@thetimes.co.uk

Australian business investment plunged by the most on record last quarter as firms slashed spending on plant and buildings. Data released overnight showed that investment dived 9.2 per cent in the third quarter - more than three times the market forecast and the fourth straight quarter of declines. Gross domestic product data for the third quarter are due next week. “You are likely to see some downwards revisions to GDP,” Su-Lin Ong, a senior economist at RBC Capital Markets told Reuters.

Holidaymakers are refusing to give in to terrorist outrages and abandon their plans for breaks in the sun, Thomas Cook, Britain’s oldest tour operator, said yesterday. With attacks and alarms almost on the doorstep in Paris and Brussels, Britons are looking further afield to long-haul destinations such as the United States, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Mexico. The Canaries also are proving popular this winter.

Sir Philip Green seems to collect celebrities in the same way that some people collect train numbers or Beatles memorabilia, and now the billionaire behind Britain’s best-known fashion empire has put Beyoncé at the top of the list. The retail tycoon, who has been photographed with everybody from George Clooney and Lionel Ritchie to Cheryl Fernandez-Versini and Nicole Scherzinger, has followed his association with Kate Moss last year with a bigger plan to work with the American superstar.

“It is a feat deemed the holy grail of rocketry. The race to launch a rocket booster to the edge of space then land it back on Earth upright and intact was always going to be hard-fought. Now two billionaires, who also happen to be among the world’s leading commercial space pioneers, are sparring over bragging rights after one beat the other to it ... then boasted about the achievement on Twitter.” The new space race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

The Nikkei has closed up 0.49 per cent at 19,944.41. IG expects the FTSE 100 to open up 4 points this morning when the market opens shortly.

The FTSE 100 rose 60.41 points, or 0.96 per cent, to 6,337.64 led higher by housebuilders which were buoyed by government home ownership plans announced in the autumn statement. The FTSE 250 gained 161.34 points, or 0.95 per cent, to 17,111.31. Read Alex Ralph’s market report here.

Wall Street remained broadly unchanged yesterday in a lightly traded mid-week session ahead of today’s Thanksgiving holiday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed just 1.2 points higher - flat in percentage terms - at 17,813.4 while the S&P 500 dipped by a quarter of one point to 2,088.9. Around 5.2 billion shares changed hands compared to the recent daily average of 7.2 billion.

Sterling strengthened for the first time in three days against the single currency and the greenback as Chancellor George Osborne raised the government’s growth forecast for next year. Against the euro, the pound was 0.4 per cent higher at €1.422 and against the US dollar it rose by 0.2 per cent to $1.511.

Oil prices turned positive in late trading in New York last night as traders covered short-positions ahead of Thanksgiving. Brent crude was 0.3 per cent ahead at $46.24 a barrel.

RPC Group is a long way from being a household name, but this packaging specialist has an excellent track record for buying businesses in a market that is rapidly consolidating. There is more good news from its latest big deal, notes Tempus. Britvic has been cutting costs and improving margins since the merger with fellow soft drinks maker AG Barr failed a couple of years ago. Hogg Robinson is not that well understood, but the travel management company is reorganising the way it serves its clients. Read on for more about the Tempus share tips of the day.

1 When a game bird was caught in water pipes in Lancashire, it prompted panic at United Utilities and the customers who drink its water. The company has revealed the £25 million cost of a disaster that initially seemed like a joke.

2 One of Britain’s highest-profile green energy projects collapsed after the government axed a £1 billion scheme to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and bury them underground.

3 Holidaymakers are refusing to be cowed by terrorist outrages and are still booking their breaks in the sun, Britain’s oldest tour operator has claimed.

4 Lloyds will announce 1,000 job cuts including among its branch staff, as part of its drive to shrink costs. The redundancies are part of the 9,000 roles Lloyds said in October last year that it would eliminate alongside the closure of 200 branches to take account of more customers using internet banking. About 2,300 jobs have gone so far.

5 Substantial upgrades to Britain’s railways will be delayed by up to three years and costs will soar by £2.5 billion after a review of Network Rail, it has emerged.

6 Mortgage lending has rocketed to a seven-year high, causing a fresh headache for policymakers as they consider taking action to rein in excessive borrowing. Meanwhile, banks handed out more money through loans and overdrafts in October than in almost a decade.

7 The man who led UK Mail’s challenge to Royal Mail in handling post from some of the country’s largest companies has been dismissed over the foul-up of a new £52 million delivery hub. UK Mail’s new post centre near Coventry has been unable to take parcels of the wrong shape, has been in chaos ahead of the key Black Friday Christmas online shopping and delivery splurge and has been responsible for two profit warnings.

8 Google has been accused by TripAdvisor and Yelp of favouring its own reviews service when displaying smartphone search results. The accusations come amid an investigation by the European Commission into allegations that Google abused its dominant position. Google responded to the allegations in August, describing them as “wrong as a matter of fact, law and economics”.

9 Revenues from MailOnline rose 18 per cent to £73 million in the year to the end of September, short of its target of £80 million. Sales in the media division of Daily Mail and General Trust overall fell by 8 per cent to £731 million.

10 DraftKings and FanDuel, two popular American daily fantasy sports companies have headed to court to defend their right to remain open for business in New York, after the state’s attorney-general tried to shut them down.

The Times
One of Britain's highest-profile green energy projects collapsed yesterday after the government axed a £1 billion scheme to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and bury them underground. The brief announcement, released after the chancellor's autumn statement, provoked anger from companies involved in the scheme to commercialise carbon capture and storage technology, including Royal Dutch Shell, SSE, BOC, GE and National Grid, as well as environmental groups.
read full update
Daily Telegraph
Sir Philip Green could be returning to the takeover trail after profits at his high street empire Arcadia grew last year on the back of Topshop's quest for world domination. The retail group, which also owns the Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge, Wallis, Evans and Burton brands, posted a 6pc rise in pre-tax profits to £214.3m during the year to the end of August.
read full update
Financial Times
George Osborne yesterday called time on the toughest phase of Britain's "age of austerity", abandoning plans to axe £4.4bn in tax credits and reining in public spending cuts as he used his Autumn Statement to pivot to the centre ground. With public and political appetite for austerity waning, the chancellor's capitulation on tax credits set the tone for a fiscal statement intended to soften the reputation that he once delighted in as a public-spending axeman.
read full update
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