CMA concerned about Vodafone-Three merger, GSK's Blenrep gets breakthrough designation in China

Stocks to watch

Britain’s competition regulator on Friday said the planned merger of mobile network operators Vodafone and Three may be expected to result in a “substantial” lessening of competition and higher prices for consumers. The Competition and Markets Authority cited the supply of mobile telecommunications services to end customers and the supply of wholesale as two areas of concern.

China’s health authority has granted GSK’s Blenrep blood cancer treatment with a so-called ‘Breakthrough Therapy Designation’, which is designed to speed up development of investigational drugs. The award was based on results from GSK’s phase III DREAMM-7 phase III clinical trial which evaluated Blenrep combined with BorDex for the treatment of relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

Newspaper round-up

A plan for a new high-speed rail line linking Birmingham and Manchester has been unveiled, claiming to deliver most of the benefits of the scrapped northern leg of HS2 at significantly cheaper cost and with only slightly longer journey times. The 50-mile track would run from where the HS2 line is now due to end in Staffordshire to join a planned Northern Powerhouse Rail line west of Manchester airport, under a plan unveiled by the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. – Guardian

Boeing workers voted on Thursday night to strike for higher pay, halting production of the planemaker’s strongest-selling jet as it wrestles with chronic output delays and mounting debt. Newly installed Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg pleaded with workers not to go on strike – the first since 2008 – ahead of the vote, saying the action would put the company’s “recovery in jeopardy”. – Guardian

Low-paid migrant workers are an immediate drain on the public purse, costing taxpayers more than £150,000 each by the time they hit state pension age, according to the Government’s tax and spending watchdog. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the average low-earner who came to Britain aged 25 cost the Government more overall than they paid in from the moment they arrived. – Telegraph

Scotland’s last remaining oil refinery at Grangemouth is to close next year with the loss of 400 jobs, leaving the UK with only a handful of refineries and increasing the country’s reliance on imported fuel. The site’s owner Petroineos, a joint venture between Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos and PetroChina, believes that domestic demand for motor fuels will fall sharply with the forthcoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars. – The Times

Artificial intelligence has moved to more human-like reasoning, OpenAI has claimed, with the launch of its latest model. In a blogpost, the ChatGPT maker said that “much like a person would”, its new o1 series would spend more time thinking before it responded to queries. The company said it could “reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and maths”. – The Times

US close

US stocks put in solid gains on Thursday as investors assessed how slowing producer-price inflation would affect the near-term outlook for interest rates ahead of the Federal Reserve's next policy meeting.

The Dow finished 0.6% higher while the S&P 500 rose 0.8% and the Nasdaq jumped 1%, with the latter two indices recording their fourth consecutive days in positive territory.

In economic data, US producer price inflation slowed to a six-month low of 1.7% in August, from a revised 2.1% in July and slightly under the 1.8% expected by the market. Over the month, wholesale prices rose by 0.2% as anticipated.

Meanwhile, US initial jobless claims rose by 2,000 week-on-week to 230,000, well above average seen earlier in the year but in line with consensus forecasts.