Wood Group performance up in first half, Bunzl keeps full-year expectations steady

Stocks to watch

Wood Group said its performance in the first half was up on the prior year in a trading update on Wednesday, reporting that revenue was in line with the first half of 2018, and the company had delivered earnings growth and margin improvement. The FTSE 100 energy services firm said that excluding the impact of IFRS 16, adjusted EBITDA in the first half would be up around 7%, and operating profit would be ahead about 25% over last year. Its full-year outlook remained unchanged.

Bunzl reported that its expectations for 2019 remain unchanged, with expected interim revenue growth of 2% at constant exchange rates, down from 12% over the same period last year. The international distribution and services group had first warned of slowing growth back in April as mixed macroeconomic and market conditions damaged North American business.

Tullow Oil said group working interest production for the first half of 2019 was expected to average around 89,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd) in a trading update on Wednesday, including production-equivalent insurance payments. As it had previously said , production in Ghana was impacted by gas compression constraints on Jubilee during February and a delay in completing a production well in the TEN field. Both issues were resolved in the first quarter, and Tullow said it was currently producing around 95,000 bopd net.

Newspaper round-up

Homebuyers in a town where properties typically cost almost 12 times local salaries may soon have a low-cost option from Ikea after a UK council agreed to work with an affordable housing developer co-owned by the retailer. Worthing Council has signed up with BoKlok, a company jointly owned by the Swedish retailer Ikea and construction firm Skanska which specialises in factory-built housing that can be constructed at a low cost. – Guardian

British workers are being shut out of decisions over the rising use of robots in the UK economy, according to a report. According to the commission on workers and technology, run by the Fabian Society and the Community trade union, almost six in 10 employees across Britain in a poll said their employers did not give them a say on the use of new technologies. - Guardian

The Government needs to tackle “inherent problems at the heart of the planning system” to have any hope of reaching its ambitious goal of building 300,000 homes a year, an influential group of MPs has warned. A report by the Public Accounts Committee released on Wednesday claims the Department for Housing “simply does not have the mechanisms in place to achieve the ... target” and urged ministers to set out their plans to boost building rates by October. – Telegraph

The former head of compliance at UBS has been convicted of leaking inside information to a friend while working for the Swiss banking giant, a jury found on Tuesday. Fabiana Abdel-Malek, 36, was convicted at Southwark Crown Court along with her friend Walid Anis Choucair, a 40-year-old former trader, on three counts of insider dealing following an 11-week trial brought by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). – Telegraph

One of Britain’s largest car dealers lost almost a quarter of its value yesterday after it revealed that the financial regulator had opened an investigation into its sales processes over the past three and a half years. Shares in Lookers fell by 24 per cent, or almost 17p, to a seven-year low of 53½p, wiping nearly £66 million off its market value, after the company said that the Financial Conduct Authority was examining its sales practices from the start of 2016 to June 13 this year. – The Times

The shadow chancellor has attacked Credit Suisse as “outrageous” after the Swiss bank began a legal battle to get back £239m of taxes it paid on bonuses during the financial crisis. The bank, which has 46,850 staff and 50 offices worldwide, is suing HM Revenue & Customs to recover taxes it paid in 2009 under a one-off levy introduced by Alistair Darling, the Labour chancellor at the time. – The Times

US close

Wall Street finished south after a session of losses on Tuesday, as tensions between Washington and Tehran continued to build and on the heels of some much weaker-than-expected consumer confidence data.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day down 0.67% at 26,548.22, the S&P 500 lost 0.95% to 2,917.38, and the Nasdaq 100 was 1.7% weaker at 7,591.54.

At the open, the Dow had lost 72.65 after closing just 8.4 points higher on Monday.

Investors spent much of the day keeping tabs on the news-flow out of the Middle East after Donald Trump signed an executive order slapping Iran's supreme leader and eight Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders with "hard-hitting" new sanctions following the downing of an unmanned US drone last week.

In response, Tehran said the latest moves by Washington meant the "permanent closure" of diplomatic channels between the two countries, labelling them "outrageous and idiotic".