Daily Mail

THE DAILY BRIEFING

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PROFIT BOOST Wealth manager Charles Stanley is back in the black with an £8.8m profit for the year to March, up from a £300,000 loss. It now oversees £24bn of funds, and hiked its annual dividend by 20pc to 6p per share.

PHARMA BACKED The standing of big pharmaceut­ical companies is improving, says the Reputation Institute, which found 44pc of people thought the industry had an ‘ excellent’ reputation and 27pc thought it was weak or poor.

TECH BOOM More than 10pc of new jobs created in the UK are now tech-based, and tech jobs are the largest non-management category advertised in London, says global jobs site Indeed. It said the Capital needs to do more to make it attractive to nomadic computer experts.

FIT FIGURES Soaring membership has kept low-cost gym operator Gym Group on track. It now has 507,000 members at 95 sites.

FASHION DEPARTURE Zoopla’s ex-finance boss Stephen Morana is to step down from the board of online fashion chain Boohoo from July 1. Iain McDonald, the chairman of Mysale, has been appointed to the board as non-executive director and will chair the company’s remunerati­on committee.

QUIET JET No-frills airline EasyJet has received its first Airbus A320neo, saying it will increase fuel efficiency, cut emissions and reduce noise during take-off and landing by 50pc.

STRIKE BALLOT Workshop staff on London Undergroun­d are to be balloted for strikes in a dispute over job security and casualisat­ion.

Members of the Rail Maritime and Transport union at depots serving the Piccadilly Line will vote in the coming weeks on whether to launch a campaign of industrial action over the recruitmen­t of new staff on fixed-term contracts, arguing they should be permanent.

TOBACCO EARNINGS The fall in the pound boosted earnings for British American Tobacco.

The cigarette giant, which owns brands such as Dunhill, Kent and Lucky Strike, expects its first half earnings to receive a tailwind of around 14pc from currency translatio­n effects.

Profit growth is expected to be weighted to the second half of the year and its full-year earnings are expected to outperform the industry, which it anticipate­s will be down around 4pc.

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