Tuesday preview: Drax, Informa

21st Feb 2011 15:42

The winter chill will have given a boost to power provider Drax, which brings out full year results on Tuesday. The market has pencilled in a figure of £305.4m for the coal-fired power station owner's pre-tax profits, on turnover of £1,426m.Broker Matrix predicts earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of £384m and is well below consensus with its sales figure of £1,332m. It is pretty much in line with the market in forecasting a full year dividend of 30.6p, which would put the shares on an impressive yield of around 7.8%, while Matrix's recently upwards revised forecast for EPS is 61.3p, versus market consensus of 62.03p."The cold weather continued for some time after the 14 December pre-close statement, which pointed to earnings being slightly ahead of consensus. This should have allowed Drax to maintain a high load factor and improve profitability," the broker predicts.Tomorrow's preliminary results from business publisher Informa are likely to be "solid", according to Singer Capital Markets, but the broker thinks "the outlook is likely to be rather muted by academic market pressures."Recent results from Reed Elsevier suggest the academic market is stable, but Singer thinks "budget pressures will cap any upside."On the professional and commercial information side of Informa's business Singer expects "some continuation of the improvement in subscriptions and copies sales," while the events division's performance could be a mixed bag."While we expect the larger events (circa half of the unit profits) to be picking up, but smaller non-marketing based conference growth could remain subdued and we don't expect any substantial growth in the Performance Improvement units training activity," Singer said. The market is expecting profit before tax of £276.6m on sales of £1,233m. Singer is a bit ahead of consensus on profit before tax, at £279.7m but a bit behind on sales, at £1,230.0m.INTERIMSDechra Pharmaceuticals, Genus, Hargreaves Services, Pan African Resources, Savile GroupINTERIM DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATEIncome & Growth VCT Q4Frontline Ltd.FINALSAeci 5 1/2% Prf, Brammer, Croda International, Dragon Oil, Drax Group, Informa, Morgan Sindall GroupEGMSX5 Retail Group NV GDR (Reg S)AGMSBankers Inv Trust, Sinclair (William) HoldingsFINAL DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATETiton HoldingsINTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTConsumer Confidence (US) (15:00)Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index (15:00)UK ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTSPublic Sector Net Cash Requirement (PSNCR) (09:30)Public Sector Net Borrowings (09:30)