Entain chair to step down, Future trading as expected in first half
London open
The FTSE 100 is expected to open six points higher on Thursday, having closed up 0.03% on Wednesday at 7,937.44.
Stocks to watch
Entain, the sports betting and gambling group currently without a permanent chief executive, has announced that chair Barry Gibson will also step down later this year following a four-year tenure. Gibson, who joined the board in November 2019 and became chair in February 2020, has given notice to retire some time before the end of September, depending on when Entain can find a replacement to former CEO Jette Nygaard-Anderson. The Ladbrokes, Sportingbet and Foxy Bingo owner has been without a CEO since December when Nygaard-Anderson resigned in the wake of a £585m settlement with the Crown Prosecution Service regarding historic activities of its Turkish business.
Future reported a return to organic revenue growth in the second quarter on Thursday, driven by strong performance in Go.Compare and its B2B division, alongside resilient results in magazines, despite challenges in affiliate products and digital advertising amid macroeconomic pressures. The FTSE 250 publisher flagged progress in its growth acceleration strategy, particularly in ‘hero’ brands and US direct advertising, after a reorganisation aimed at enhancing agility and execution speed. It said it remained highly cash generative, and anticipated meeting full-year expectations, with its first half results set to be announced in May.
Newspaper round-up
Delivery app riders pedalling through cities and tailbacks at drive-throughs were familiar signs of Britain’s hunger for takeaway food at the peak of the Covid pandemic. Now a study suggests it became an enduring habit. After a boom in orders on Deliveroo, Just Eat and other platforms by locked-down consumers, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) suggests the popularity of takeaways, meal deliveries and food-on-the-go bought from retailer such as sandwiches and crisps has remained above pre-pandemic levels after the removal of Covid restrictions. – Guardian
Holidaymakers will continue to face limits on the amount of liquid they can carry on flights out of the UK this summer after the government extended the deadline for airports to install new security scanners by a year. The Department for Transport had previously set a target for the introduction of 3D scanners in all UK airports by 1 June, but this has now been extended by 12 months because some major airports will not be ready in time. – Guardian
Elon Musk’s Tesla is exploring constructing a multibillion dollar electric vehicle factory in India as the country’s prime minister seeks to put the brakes on China’s dominance. Tesla is planning to send a team to India later this month to hunt for possible locations for the plant which could be worth as much as $3bn (£2.4bn), the Financial Times reported. – Telegraph
An activist investor in Dr Martens has urged the troubled boot brand to consider a sale or merger amid concerns about its “deeply discounted” valuation. Marathon Partners Equity Management, the New York-based investment company, said it had “serious concerns” about the retailer’s stagnant growth and the 80 per cent slide in share price since it listed in London three years ago. – The Times
A break up of HSBC through a spin-off of its Asian business “will not happen,” the bank’s chairman Mark Tucker has insisted, as bosses seek to move on from a campaign by activist investors to split the lender in two. The future of the London-listed bank became the subject of intense debate in the City two years ago after it emerged that Ping An, a Chinese insurer that is HSBC’s biggest shareholder, was agitating for the lender to hive off its Asian operations as a separately listed company based in Hong Kong. – The Times
US close
US stocks finished mixed on Wednesday and were range bound for most of the session as investors continued to pour over economic data and assess its impact on monetary policy.
The Dow finished 0.1% lower, while the S&P 500 gained 0.1% and the Nasdaq rose 0.2%, with little separating the benchmark's intraday highs and lows.
Comments from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell were dominating newsflow in afternoon trade, after he downplayed concerns that a recent pick-up in economic activity has changed the Fed's inflation outlook.
“The recent data do not [...] materially change the overall picture, which continues to be one of solid growth, a strong but rebalancing labour market, and inflation moving down to 2% on a sometimes bumpy path,” Powell said.
Data released during the session showed that expansion in the American services sector slowed to a three-month low. The ISM's non-manufacturing PMI declined to 51.4 in March from 52.6 in February, surprising economists who pencilled in an increase to 52.7. The lesser-followed S&P Global US services PMI meanwhile was unchanged at 51.7.