Thursday preview: Sainsbury, JD Sports, Hays

6th Jan 2010 12:54

Focus remains firmly on the retailers on Thursday with supermarket chain Sainsbury and sportswear fashion seller JD Sports both giving trading updates.Sainsbury has been playing catch-up with Tesco and Asda for the last few years, all the while looking over its shoulder at fast growing sector number four, Morrisons.At the interim stage its profits beat expectations, but in the last quarter of 2009 there were signs that the revival was starting to run out of steam as, like the other food retailers, falling food price inflation put a crimp on sales growth.Sainsbury, the number three operator in the UK supermarket sector, responded to Tesco’s Clubcard promotion by heavily pushing its own loyalty card scheme, Nectar. Analysts will be looking to see if this has had a similarly galvanising effect on sales as it has done at Tesco.JD Sports has been the class act of the sportswear retail sector, if only because it has the honesty to admit that its clothes are purely fashion items and are unlikely to be worn in any sort of genuine physical activity.At the beginning of December the company said it remained confident about the group’s prospects for the rest of the financial year, on the back of a slight improvement in like for like sales growth in the preceding 11 weeks from the 32 weeks prior to that.The likes of Next and Marks & Spencer have received a boost from cold weather purchases, which may not apply to JD Sports, unless there has been a rush on ski jackets. Its rivals, Sports Direct and JJB Sports, appear to be getting their acts together after a turbulent couple of years, which may slow JD's growth somewhat, but given that the company offloaded £16.2m in shares in JJB Sports in December it clearly is not quaking in its boots yet at the prospect of a JJB Sports revival.Away from the retail sector, analysts will be hoping for more signs of the stability recruitment giant Hays spoke of in its November trading update.The recruiter said things have more or less stopped getting worse in the UK and Asia, though it would not go so far as to call a recovery. Things remained on the slide in Europe, however, although at least the pace of decline was slowing.With things getting better in the US economy faster than many pundits had expected, there has been speculation the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) might soon be thinking of nudging up interest rates.Analysts will therefore pore over the release of the minutes from the most recent meeting of the FOMC even more carefully to read the runes on the committee’s intentions.INTERIM DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE British Smaller Companies VCT, Caledonia Investments, Hill and Smith, Sepura, Vedanta Resources QUARTERLY PAYMENT DATE GlaxoSmithKline EGMS Integra Group GDR (Reg S) AGMS Solo Oil TRADING ANNOUNCEMENTS Hays, Sainsbury J., JD Sports Fashion UK ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTSPurchasing Managers Index Services (09:30)INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTSPurchasing Managers Index Services (GER) (08:55)Purchasing Managers Index Services (EU) (09:00)Industrial New Orders (EU) (10:00)Producer Price Index (EU) (10:00)MBA Mortgage Applications (US) (12:00)ADP Employment Change (US) (13:15)ISM Non-Manufacturing (US) (15:00)EIA Crude Oil Stock (US) (15:30)FOMC Minutes (US) (19:00)