Berkeley reaffirms full-year guidance, Restaurant Group chair stepping down

Stocks to watch

UK housebuilder Berkeley on Friday reaffirmed full-year earnings guidance but said private sales reservations were down 35% due to rising interest rates and political volatility. In a trading statement ahead of its annual general meeting, the group said it expected to deliver pre-tax profits of at least £1.05bn across the current and next financial years, likely to be weighted slightly to full-year 2024. Berkeley said it had more than 90% of full-year 2024 revenue exchanged and anticipated cash due on forward sales to be around £2bn at October 31, 2023 compared with £2.14bn at the end of April.

The Restaurant Group has announced that its chairman Ken Hanna is stepping down next year "due to personal reasons". The company, which owns 380 restaurants and pubs across the UK including Wagamama and Brunning & Price, said Hanna has decided not to seek re-election at its next AGM in 2024, but will stick around until a successor is appointed.

Newspaper round-up

Maintaining the triple lock on state pensions could add as much as £45bn to the welfare bill by 2050, putting “insurmountable pressure” on the government to increase the minimum retirement age, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In a report published ahead of the release next week of official data for earnings growth, which will be used to set the annual increase in pensions, the IFS estimates spending on retirees could rise by a further £2bn from April 2024. - Guardian

Five million single-use vapes are being thrown away in the UK every week, a fourfold increase on 2022, research has found. This amounts to eight vapes a second being discarded, with the lithium in the products enough to create 5,000 electric car batteries a year. – Guardian

Hiring is falling at the fastest pace in more than three years in a sign that soaring interest rates are starting to cool down the jobs market. Employers are feeling increasingly cautious about taking on new staff and many have hiring freezes in place, recruiters reported, according to a closely watched survey by accountancy giant KPMG and industry body the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC). – Telegraph

Deloitte has cemented its position as the biggest of the Big Four accounting firms by winning business advising on climate change and cybersecurity risks even as its financial advisory services suffered amid a dearth of takeovers. The group’s global revenue in its latest financial year, which ran until the end of May, rose 14.9 per cent to $64.9 billion, a fresh record and higher than its rivals EY, KPMG and PwC. – The Times

The self-styled “voice of British business” and the manufacturers’ group Make UK have confirmed they are in talks about areas of potential collaboration that could be the prelude to a full-blown merger. “Make UK and the CBI are in early-stage discussions to explore how the two parties might work closer together,” Make UK, which speaks for 20,000 companies and three million people in the manufacturing and engineering sectors, told Sky News. “These discussions are positive and constructive but remain at an early stage.” – The Times

US close

Wall Street finished with a diverse performance on Thursday, driven by fresh economic data amid significant losses from tech giant Apple on the Nasdaq.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day up 0.17% to settle at 34,500.73, while the S&P 500 ended in negative territory, declining 0.32% to close at 4,451.14.

However, the most noticeable drop was on the Nasdaq Composite, which registered a decline of 0.89%, ending the day at 13,748.83.

In the currency markets, the dollar was last up 0.02% on sterling, trading at 80.2p, while it inched up 0.01% against the euro to 93.5 euro cents.

The greenback did, however, decrease by a subtle 0.01% on the yen, changing hands at JPY 147.28.