London pre-open: Geopolitical tensions set to weigh on FTSE
London stocks were set for a weaker open on Thursday as worries about the Russia-Ukraine situation returned.
The FTSE 100 was called to open 33 points lower at 7,570.
CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson said: "Despite yesterday’s rebound by US markets, which saw stocks pullback most of their intraday losses today’s Europe open looks set to be a negative one after unnamed US officials briefed that Russa had added another 7,000 troops to their number, contrary to their claims they were pulling back, and this appears to have tipped Asia markets lower.
"Today we have little in the way of data to focus on, other than the latest US weekly jobless claims, which are expected to fall back from 223k to 217k, with continuing claims falling back to 1.6m."
Investors will also be digesting the latest minutes from the US Federal Reserve released overnight. Hewson said: "Last night’s Fed minutes didn’t really add to the sum of overall knowledge about the Federal Reserve policymakers’ intentions with respect to raising rates, as well as reducing the size of the balance sheet. It’s widely accepted that rates will rise in March, however markets are currently split between whether the Fed will move by 25bps, or by 50bps.
"Nonetheless, based on those minutes, US markets took the positives from the fact that there wasn’t a significant quorum of policymakers in favour of a 50bps rate rise, closing well off their lows of the day."
In corporate news, Reckitt Benckiser suffered an £804m annual operating loss as the consumer goods company booked a loss on the sale of its Chinese infant formula business.
The group swung to the loss under IFRS accounting rules for the year to the end of December from a profit of £2.16bn a year earlier. Net revenue fell 5.8% to £3.36bn.
Excluding the sale of the IFCN business, operating profit fell 8.5%, or 2.6% at constant currency, to £2.94bn. Like-for-like net revenue rose 3.3% and Reckitt said it was targeting growth of 1-4% on that basis in 2022. The company left its annual dividend unchanged at 174.6p a share.
Online grocer and technology group Ocado and France’s Groupe Casino said they had signed a deal to extend their current partnership and create a new joint venture to support the development and management of single or multi-tenanted distribution centres in France.
"Underpinned by the success of their partnership and expanding operations in Ile-de-France, Ocado and Groupe Casino believe there is significant and growing demand for online grocery services across the French market, creating a huge opportunity to leverage their combined expertise, including Ocado's UK experience providing multi-retailer customer fulfilment centres," the companies said in a joint statement.
Property investment firm CLS Holdings has unconditionally exchanged contracts to acquire a 9,168 square metre office building in Dusseldorf from Alstria Office REIT for €25.0m.
The FTSE 250-listed firm said the acquisition of Kanzlerstraße 8, which has a weighted average unexpired lease term of around eight years, a net initial yield of 5.1% and a reversionary yield of 5.7%, was expected to complete in April 2022.