City-sceptic Renishaw set for FTSE 100 promotion
ENTRY to the exclusive club of bluechip companies looked set to be the ultimate parting gift for the octogenarian founders of engineering group Renishaw today.
A late surge in share price after Sir David McMurtry and John Deer yesterday announced plans to sell the business means Renishaw is in the frame for promotion to the FTSE 100 index when the next top flight reshuffle is confirmed tonight.
The precision engineer, which they set up in their garages in 1973, was valued at about £4.8 billion at last night’s cut-off point for prices in the index review.
Promotion — regardless of how brief the stay is — would represent a fitting finale for the duo, having become famed for eschewing City orthodoxy, keeping debts low and ignoring the notion that British industry could not compete with China.
The reshuffle, which comes into effect later this month, will see supermarket Morrisons and water company Pennon relegated to the 250. In another victory for the industrial sector, mining services company Weir is expected to join the FTSE 100 index.
The top flight made strong headway today, with improved risk appetite helping Barclays and Standard Chartered rise more than 3%. With the FTSE 100 up 73.62 points to 6,687.45, other risers included Aviva with a gain of 7.6p to 380.6p. Pennon rallied 7.4p to 925.2p after a buy recommendation and target price of 1,060p from broker SocGen, but this has come too late to preserve its top flight status.
One stock fighting hard to rejoin the blue-chip club is Micro Focus International, which surged 15% or 66.4p to 504.6p after signing a deal with Amazon Web Services. Micro Focus technology will be used to help customers move their mainframe applications and workloads to the AWS Cloud.