Admiral first-half profits rise, Woodside defers tax against Sangomar project

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 21 points higher on Thursday, having closed up 0.56% on Wednesday at 8,281.05.

Stocks to watch

Insurance group Admiral on Thursday posted a 32% rise in half-year pre-tax profits to £310m, driven by an improved current year underwriting performance and continued significant prior period releases. It also declared an interim dividend of 71p a share including a special payout of 19.7p a share, up 39%.

Woodside flagged production costs of $710m to $780m for its first half on Thursday, and an income tax expense of $100m to $200m, reflecting the first-time recognition of a net deferred tax asset for the Sangomar project. The company, due to report on 27 August, said that recognition and other tax adjustments had significantly lowered its company's effective income tax rate for the six months compared to the prior year. It said the adjustments, however, would not affect its half-year tax payments.

Newspaper round-up

Cybersecurity firm Wiz, which last month rejected a $23bn (£18bn) takeover bid from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is to open a European headquarters in London – a move that is a major shot in the arm for the UK’s aspiration to be a global tech hub. The new office, the company’s first in Europe, will be run by co-founder and research and development head, Roy Reznik, who is relocating from Israel to the UK capital to underscore the company’s business ambitions in the region. – Guardian

Uncertainty over the future of Tata Steel in south Wales is already causing job losses in the broader industry, the Welsh secretary has warned, as the government scrambles to reduce the toll of redundancies in Port Talbot. Speaking on Wednesday ahead of announcing the first £13.5m tranche of funding to support laid-off workers, the secretary of state for Wales, Jo Stevens, criticised the former Conservative government for what she said was a failure to prepare for the possibility of thousands of jobs losses at Port Talbot. – Guardian

John Lewis is set to put storeroom workers on its shop floors in a race to improve customer service and win back sales. The company said it will no longer have separate backroom workers and shop floor staff in order to free up more employees to work on checkouts and serve customers in fitting rooms, for example. – Telegraph

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up has unveiled a new chatbot which, it claims, matches the performance of rivals such as ChatGPT. xAI described the chatbot, Grok-2, as a “significant step forward” for the company and said that it was on a par with the AI models of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. – The Times

The Treasury has insisted it remains in “positive discussions” with AstraZeneca over the pharmaceutical company’s planned £450 million investment in a vaccine manufacturing facility in northwest England. Doubts over the investment have surfaced following a report that the Treasury has sought to cut the amount of state support for the project to £40 million, below the at least £65 million Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, is understood to have verbally offered AstraZeneca to expand its nasal flu vaccines plant in Speke. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks closed higher on Wednesday as market participants digested key inflation data.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.61% at 40.008.39, while the S&P 500 advanced 0.38% to 5,455.21 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.03% firmer at 17,192.60.

The Dow closed 242.75 points higher on Wednesday, extending gains recorded in the previous session.

Wednesday's primary focus was last month's consumer price index reading, which revealed the cost of living in the US rose at its slowest pace in over three years last month.

According to the Department of Labor, the consumer price index increased at a month-on-month clip of 0.2% at both the headline and core levels, as expected by economists.

The annual rate of increase in headline CPI, however, slipped from 3.0% for June to 2.9% in July - its slowest pace since March 2021.