Hollywood Bowl earnings rise, Hunting secures $86m order from KOC

Stocks to watch

Hollywood Bowl reported a 10.5% rise in half-year earnings and lifted its dividend by a fifth on the back of record revenues, driven by strong trading in the UK and Canada.

Pre-tax profit came in at £29.5m as revenue rose 8% to £119.2m. The dividend was increased 21.7% to 3.98p a share.

Engineering firm Hunting said it had secured a second OCTG order with Kuwait Oil Company, through its distributor in Kuwait, with a value totalling $86m.

With this order, Hunting has now been awarded contracts with a total value of $231m from KOC for OCTG casing and its premium connections.

Newspaper round-up

Union leaders are preparing to ramp up industrial action at two south Wales steelworks, in a further escalation of a row over almost 3,000 job losses that threatens to become a big general election issue. Unite said such moves at the Port Talbot and Llanwern works are planned after the sites’ Indian owner, Tata Steel, threatened to cut redundancy pay as a response to members voting for an overtime ban. – Guardian

Britain’s councils are preparing a record £1.4bn record fire sale in assets and cancelled investments as they scramble to plug a debt black hole ahead of the election. The Government has given 18 councils the green light to sell-off assets and mothball projects to release cash in a bid to avoid another wave of council bankruptcies before the nation heads to the polls on July 4. – Telegraph

HSBC faces steep losses from the unravelling of the Barclay family’s sprawling business empire, new documents show. The British banking giant is owed £143m by the Barclay family’s delivery business, which fell into administration in March. Restructuring experts at Teneo overseeing the administration have warned that, based on the current outlook, the bank “will not be repaid in full”. – Telegraph

The Labour Party has held talks with the boss of Shein to try to persuade the Chinese-founded fast-fashion company to opt for a blockbuster London float. Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, Sarah Jones, the shadow minister for industry, and Chris Bryant, the shadow minister for creative industries, are understood recently to have met Donald Tang, the executive chairman of Shein, to discuss a potential initial public offering in London. – The Times

Nvidia has revealed its latest suite of artificial intelligence products, saying it is on an “accelerated road map” for new launches. Addressing the Computex conference in Taipei, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, said the company would release a next-generation processor platform called Rubin. His comments came less than three months after the announcement of Blackwell in March. – The Times

US close

US stocks rallied into the close on Friday with the Dow and S&P 500 rising strongly after economic data showed a moderation in consumer spending growth and the slowest monthly gain in prices so far this year – two factors that could increase the pressure on the Federal Reserve to start cutting interest rates.

After a tentative start as investors digested a flurry of datapoints, both the Dow and S&P 500 gained rapidly in afternoon trade, with the Dow jumping 1.5% and the S&P 500 advancing 0.8%. The Nasdaq, however, remained flat.

The Dow in particular was rebounding after a three-day skid during which it lost 2.5% of its value.