Moneysupermarket slumps on Jefferies downgrade

Moneysupermarket.com was under the cosh on Thursday as Jefferies downgraded the stock to ‘hold’ from ‘buy’ and cut the price target to 312p from 440p.

The bank said it was updating its estimates after reviewing the latest data set from Hitwise, an online monitoring service which provides rankings of the world’s most popular websites.

Jefferies said Hitwise was arguably the UK’s most authoritative source of online data analytics for desktop and mobile traffic.

The bank said it was moving to hold “given Hitwise analysis showing a weak start to 2016, muted financial expectations, and the equity performance over the past 18 months”.

“Over the last three years, there have been some meaningful moves in market share and MoneySupermarket.com is no longer the market leader, according to Hitwise at any rate,” it said.

Jefferies cut its group revenue forecasts by around 6.5% for FY 2016/17/18, driven by low double-digit reductions in Insurance and Travel.

It also cut its adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation estimates by around 13% over the tree years.

Meanwhile, adjusted earnings per share estimates for FY16 and FY17 were reduced by around 12%.

At 0950 BST, shares were down 7.3% to 306.70p.