Small cap round up

Lavendon has agreed to be taken over by equipment rental group Loxam at a price of 220p in cash, valuing the aerial work platforms specialist at rouhgly £374m. Lavendon's directors will recommend the offer, which is at a 58.3% premium to the closing price on 21 November when the potential deal was first mooted, to shareholders over the hostile bid from Belgium's TVH, which now owns around 9% of its shares and has already received clearance from the German competition authority.

Audioboom warned that losses would be worse than expected for the full year even though revenue will be better than forecasts as the spoken word on-demand platform expands in the US. Revenue for 2016 is expected to exceed £1.3m, an increase of more than six fold compared to last year, and ahead of market expectations, but due to higher audience acquisition costs and recruitment fees as it expands across the Atlantic, the AIM-listed company said loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation for the year were now expected be greater than market expectations.

Letting agency Hunters Property said it confident that it could manage and adapt to the government’s plan to ban tenant fees, while its performance has been little changed despite uncertainty arisen since the Brexit vote. In the autumn statement in November, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that letting agents would be banned from charging tenants fees, following a similar move in Scotland in 2012.

Mineral & Financial Investments reported that its 49%-owned TH Crestgate has unearthed "unexpectedly high" copper content as it begins drilling at the Lagoa Salgada zinc-copper project in Portugal. TH Crestgate, which owns 85% of Lagoa Salgada, intends to drill four holes to further investigate the potential of a copper-bearing area where one intersection delivered 93.1 metres at 0.94% copper, 2.22% zinc, 1.46% lead, 0.09 grams per tonne gold and 27 grams per tonne silver.

MediaZest reported its unaudited results for the six months to 30 September on Wednesday, for itself and its wholly owned subsidiary company MediaZest International.The AIM-traded firm’s revenue for the period was £1.47m, while gross profit at £0.63m was up 2%.

Mineral exploration and mining company China Nonferrous Gold announced on Wednesday that Li Li had resigned as its finance director. The AIM-traded firm, currently mining the Pakrut gold project in the Republic of Tajikistan, only cited ‘personal reasons’ for Li’s departure.