Inchcape takeover of Derco cleared, Bluefield Solar buys portfolio

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 19 points higher on Friday, having closed down 0.37% on Thursday at 7,469.28.

Stocks to watch

Auto distributor Inchcape said Peruvian authorities had cleared its planned £1.3bn takeover of Derco, with completion of the deal expected to take place by the end of the year. The green-light follows approval from Inchcape’s shareholders last week. Derco is the biggest automotive distributor in Latin America and runs sites in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia.

UK renewables income fund Bluefield Solar has bought a 46.4 megawatt solar portfolio from North America’s Fengate Asset Management. Bluefield said the enterprise value of the portfolio is £56m, including the economic benefit of all cash flows from May 2022. The portfolio contains £27.3m of long-term amortising debt provided by Australian private equity outfit Macquarie. The portfolio consists of two ground-mounted solar photovoltaic plants, the 39.3 MWp Raventhorpe plant located in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire and the 7.1 MWp Roanhead facility in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.

Newspaper round-up

Border Force officials will on Friday join the wave of industrial action across Britain, starting the first of a series of strikes at airports, while Royal Mail workers walk out again for two days before Christmas. Passengers travelling into the UK have been warned to be prepared for longer queues at immigration in airports, while many letters and parcels will now go undelivered before Christmas, as staff take action over pay trailing behind inflation. - Guardian

Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former head of FTX, will be released on a $250 million bond while he awaits trial on fraud charges related to the collapse of the crypto exchange, a court in New York ruled yesterday. The 30-year-old appeared in the dock soon after his extradition from the Bahamas, where he lived and FTX was based, as two former associates pleaded guilty to defrauding investors. - The Times

The shopworkers union Usdaw has been given the green light by the supreme court to challenge Tesco’s controversial tactic of firing staff then rehiring them on less favourable contracts. The union was granted permission to proceed with a case after the appeal court overturned a high court ruling that banned Tesco from dismissing staff at its warehouses in Daventry and Litchfield and then seeking to re-employ them on lower pay. - Guardian

Britain is on course to suffer the deepest recession of any significant developed nation next year as stagnating wages and a slowdown in household spending hold back a recovery. The bleak forecast came yesterday as the Office for National Statistics released an analysis suggesting that the UK’s economy contracted more sharply than previously thought in the third quarter of 2022. It calculates that gross domestic product, the main measure of output, shrank by 0.3 per cent in three months to September, compared with a preliminary estimate of 0.2 per cent. Manufacturing and construction output declined more steeply than first thought, down by 2.8 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively, reflecting “a bigger impact of rising prices on energy consumption”. - The Times

Divorce rates will climb at the fastest pace since 1971 and unhappiness will reach the highest levels since record began next year, as British workers get poorer than the French. Real wages in France are set to overtake British counterparts even though most employees across the Channel work fewer hours, PwC predicts, as real wages in Britain will fall back to levels last seen in 2006 next year. - Telegraph

US close

Stocks tumbled on Wall Street on Thursday, reversing most of their gains made on Wednesday, as a raft of decent data replaced hopes of a pre-Christmas ‘Santa rally’ with renewed rate hike fears.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1.05% at 33,027.49, as the S&P 500 lost 1.45% to 3,822.39, and the Nasdaq Composite was off 2.18% at 10,476.12.

The Dow closed 348.99 points lower on Thursday, erasing most of the gains it made during a stellar session on Wednesday.

On the macroeconomic front, final GDP growth came in higher than expected in the third quarter, with the United States economy expanding by 3.2% quarter-on-quarter.

That was above the prior estimate of 2.9% growth, and a reversal of the 0.6% contraction seen in the second quarter.