London pre-open: Footsie to fall

10th Nov 2010 07:34

It's looking like another dreary start Wednesday, with last night's surrender on Wall Street dampening the mood in the City.Futures prices point to an early 15-point drop for London's leading index.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. Including property profits, profit grew 36% to £466m. Sales including VAT increased by 7% to £11.94bn and rose 4.8% ignoring fuel. Like for like (LFL) sales including VAT but not fuel were up 2%. With fuel they jumped 4.4%.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%. Operating in profits in the year so far are up 21% to £1.35bn. Sales in Asia rose by 25% to £353m over the last three months, making a year-to-date 32% increase to £1.07bn.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.