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High pound also impacts Renishaw and GlaxoSmithKline

Following on from my blog post a couple of days ago about the high pound impacting the profits of technology companies, yesterday saw final results from Renishaw (RSW) and interims from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) which reflected the same issue. However, the currency impact in both companies was not the main impact on the subsequent share price move. At Renishaw, profits would have been £6.8m higher on top of an "adjusted" figure of £70.1m for the year, but for the currency impact. Last years ...

High pound impacts Croda, Abcam and others

Today Croda issued their interim results for the six months to the end of June. Croda is a speciality chemicals company and less than 10% of its revenue arises in the UK. A very substantial proportion comes from the USA and from other dollar denominated sales elsewhere. The high pound (currently over $1.70 to the pound) is having a big impact on companies such as Croda. In the six month figures revenue in constant currency terms is up 2.5% and operating ...

Tesco admits it needs a new leader

Today Tesco announced that CEO Philip Clarke is departing. The statement included a further profit warning which mentioned that the overall market is weaker and trading profit in the first half of the year is below expectations. It's surely an acceptance that Mr Clarke had been given long enough to turn around the business, but had ultimately failed (he has been in the CEO role since March 2011). The new CEO is to be Dave Lewis who joins from Unilever where he has ...

Alkane Placing – What a Wheeze!

Today (17/7/2014) Alkane Energy announced a placing to raise £8m to fund the acquisition of three power response companies. The placing was at 36p, when the closing price the previous day was 39.5p indicating a discount of 9%. But as with all such placings, the news had got around the market beforehand, so it's more like a 15% discount to the share price before the news spread. So what you may ask? It's just another placing that prejudices private shareholders who were ...

Blinkx AGM Report – Was it a black swan event?

At the Blinkx AGM today the events of the last year were various described by the management as a "black swan event", "one in a 1000 years", and "a perfect storm". That probably echoed the emotions of shareholders after the Edelman blog, the attack by shorters, the resulting collapse in the share price, and the subsequent profits warning that caused it to fall by a further 60%. The share price peaked at 230p in November 2013 and is now 35p, so ...