London pre-open: FTSE to inch higher ahead of European data

7th Jan 2014 07:31

City sources predict the FTSE 100 will open around seven points above yesterday's close of 6,730.73, largely ignoring declines suffered in both the US and Asia as attention turns to German unemployment and Eurozone inflation.A report issued yesterday showed that service-sector activity growth had slowed across the globe in December, pushing US stocks lower for a third day.Data out since the beginning of the year has, all in all, been rather poor, although investors in the UK appear to be focusing on this positives as they await further guidance from today's stats from across the Channel. According to Market Analyst at Alpari, Craig Erlam: "German unemployment has remained remarkably low throughout both the initial financial crisis and then the debt crisis, both when compared to the likes of the US and the UK and, particularly, the rest of the Eurozone. "The unemployment rates has remained at the upper end of 6% for the majority of the last couple of years and this is not expected to have changed in December, with the rate remaining at 6.9% following no change in the number of unemployed." As for Eurozone inflation, consumer price figures will be under scrutiny today ahead of the European Central Bank (ECB) policy decision on Thursday. Data is expected to show that the annual rate of inflation in December was unchanged from 0.9% in November, when it had picked up from a four-year low of 0.7% in October.However, analysts at Danske Bank said they expect a "fairly sharp fall to a new low of just 0.6%". This, they said, would put additional pressure on the ECB to ease monetary policy further: "In our view, it will probably cave, although we do not expect this to happen at the coming week's rate-setting meeting." On the company front in the UK, easyJet carried 3.5% more passengers in December compared to a year ago, the budget airline revealed this morning. The European carrier had 4.49m passengers on board its aircraft last month, up from 4.33m in December 2012. The load factor, which represents the numbers of passengers to the number of seats available, was unchanged at 87.9%.In other company news, international engineering and project management company AMEC has been awarded a renewed contract by the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) to provide Project Management Consultancy services for a portfolio of major upstream projects in Kuwait.Anglo-Dutch information group Reed Elsevier has named Centrica's Nick Luff as its Chief Financial Officer. Luff will take over in 2014 from Duncan Palmer who announced his resignation in September 2013. He will leave the business when a hand-over has been completed, the group confirmed in a company statement.NR