London open: Slow start after mixed results

10th Nov 2010 08:54

London has made a slow start with miners running into profit taking after their good run and a mixed response to the latest slug of trading updates.Sainsbury's made enough money to keep analysts happy during the first half though and sales were pretty much as expected given the supermarket giant updated the market just a month ago. Profit before tax, the benefit of any property deals and other one-offs was £332m for the 28 weeks to 2 October, up 8.1% on last year. Analysts were looking for £330m.Another strong performance from its Asian operations helped Prudential's sales jump 17% over the last three months, though the US and UK also went well. Third quarter sales rose to £809m, up from £689m, to take the year-to-date total to £2.46bn, up 24%.Fears that the dividend of utility Scottish & Southern Energy might be under threat look premature, as the company bumped up its interim dividend by 6.7%. The company hiked its interim dividend from 21.0p last year to 22.4p this time round, and said it is on course for a full year dividend of at least 74.5p per share. Miners are weak after as profit takers cover some of their gains after the new highs for gold and silver yesterday. Randgold and Lonmin are the worst performers.Trendy clothing group SuperGroup saw its breakneck growth speed up in the three months to the end of October. Total group sales in the period were up 68% to £57.5m from £34.1m a year earlier. That brought sales for the first six months of the group's financial year up to £90.3m, up 65% on the £54.7m achieved in the first half of last year.Advertising agency WPP has bought I-Behavior, a US consumer and business transaction data firm. I-Behavior is a privately-held database marketing business which provides direct marketing services to multi-channel merchants, based on consumer purchase transaction data. which includes over 8 billion purchase transactions. The database covers purchases by 171m consumers from 110m households.Conveyor belt maker Fenner's results for the year ended 31 August showed revenue up 11% to £552.5m as demand improved markedly in the second half. Underlying pre-tax profit jumped 49% to £46.3m and was up 38% to £57m at the operating level.Engineering software firm Aveva saw a return to growth in sales and profits at the interim stage. Revenue in the six months to the end of September rose 12% to £78.5m from £69.9m at the interim stage last year.