Industry news

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has moved to acquire cardiovascular drug specialists Omthera Pharmaceuticals, in a deal valued at £294 million.

Omthera provides oil based drugs produced from fish and the move to acquire the drug heart specialist comes after the successful purchase of AlphaCore Pharma, another small firm working in the cardiovascular field.

The move by AstraZeneca places the pharmaceutical firm in direct competition with GlaxoSmithKline which already has fish oil based heart drugs in the market.

The recent move to acquire cardiovascular firms comes as AstraZeneca begins to see pharmaceutical patents expire on former products, resulting in an increasing fall in profits.

Sales fall at AstraZeneca as competition and price rises take their toll

AstraZeneca meets with union leaders regarding R&D move

Italian based car manufacturer Fiat has seen its shares boosted after a rise in speculation surrounding the acquisition of U.S. based Chrysler.

Fiat is now reportedly looking to buy the remaining 41 percent that is currently held by a union group.

The Italian company already has a significant hold on Chrysler, owning a significant stake in the business after Chrysler agreed on a partnership after nearing close to ruin.

Shares have risen due to the potential for access to U.S. markets from the deal, which would result in one of the largest car manufactures in the globe.

US car manufactures see record sales

Ford’s Southampton van factory set for closure

Water company Severn Trent are expecting to receive a new increased takeover offer from a group of international investors, after the rejection of an offer at £21 per share.

An investor consortium consisting of Canadian group Borealis Infrastructure Management, the Kuwaiti Investment Office, and the UK Universities Superannuation Scheme, had their initial offer of around £4.7 billion rejected outright.

Severn Trent are rumoured to be holding out for a bid of around £5 billion, with a valuation of £23 a share.

The water company is to report full-year figures on this Thursday, with the results being used to argue for an increased offer. Severn Trent holds a strong position as one of the few remaining UK water companies after a series of acquisitions.

IBM appointed as innovation partner for Thames Water

Southern Water signs with TCS for systems transformation project

UK based food retailer Waitrose has signed a deal with Chilean supermarket chain Unimarc, as the UK chain continues to expand into overseas markets.

The deal will see Waitrose supply products including pasta, mayonnaise, biscuits and tea to customers in Chile. The move comes as Waitrose announced that international sales increased by 20 percent over the last year.

Waitrose business-to-business director, David Morton, commented: “"South America, in particular Chile, has a growing economy and we were approached by Unimarc to help meet the demand for more cosmopolitan flavours among their customers."

The addition of Chile to Waitrose’s overseas markets represents the 46th country that the supermarket now holds a presence in, since the company started exporting internationally in 1996.

Ocado reports high festive sales

Chile drills for outsourcing business

The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, has said that they’re “encouraging signs of tangible improvements”, within the UK economy.

The comments were made on a visit to London, which saw the ECB president point to the “impressive” performance of Ireland, Spain and Portugal on their road to economic recovery.

The speech by Mr Draghi can be seen as an attempt to sure up confidence in markets, specifically that Eurozone is recovering with greater stability.

Despite his comments, Europe is still struggling to see renewed economic growth, with Eurozone stalwart Germany seeing shrinking growth. The German economy saw growth of just 0.1 percent in the first quarter.

UK service sector activity reaches eight month high despite Eurozone recession

Virgin Media Business has signed a five year fibre optic broadband contract, valued at £49 million, with BskyB.

The contract will see Virgin provide a superfast fibre infrastructure to BskyB, allowing the broadband network provider to deliver high speeds and greater overall bandwidth capacity. The new network is planned to be in place by the end of 2013.

The deal was signed at the end of the first quarter, with details of the contract having been released today. The development of fibre infrastructure is designed to allow BskyB to not only to meet customer demand, but to also provide opportunity for increased service innovation.

Tony Grace, managing director of Virgin Media Business, said: “High capacity connectivity is vital in today’s digitally driven world”.

Mohamed Hammady, director of Sky Network Services at BSkyB, said: “this agreement provides us with the capacity we need to keep innovating for customers and as such are committed to maintaining our high-capacity network,”

BSkyB buys Telefonica broadband business as it competes with Virgin for 2nd place in broadband race

Annual profits at Royal Mail rise to £324 million in the face of privatisation, as the UK government moves forward with the planned sell-off.

Annual pre-tax profits have risen by as much as 60 percent, from a total of £201 million the same time last year, as markets respond to the government’s privatisation plans for the postal service.

The government is looking to raise capital and modernise the UK’s postal infrastructure by looking to place the mail service on the London stock exchange within a year.

The government required the Royal Mail to show signs of growth and strong performance as part of the requisites for privatisation.

Royal Mail have undergone a programme of transformation including job redundancies and a focus on modernisation, as the mail service seeks to compete against private postal organisations and popularity of electronic mail services.

Royal Mail chief executive, Moya Greene, said of the profit increase: “Our strategy is delivering. The transformation of Royal Mail is well under way."

Royal Mail floatation begins

Royal Mail: profit & privatisation

Marks & Spencer has recorded the lowest sales in four years after reporting low clothing sales. Pre-tax profits for 2012-2013 came in at just over £665.2 million, a fall of 6 percent from results published the same time last year.

The results also were well below the Cities forecast at the start of the financial year, of £710 million.

Overall sales at M&S dropped by 1 percent with only food sales providing respite from the negative reports, with an increase of 1.7 percent.

The retailer has said that investments “building longer term foundations”, including the recent construction of a new distribution centre at Castle Donington designed to increase M&S’s focus on online sales, had increased short-term costs.

Despite the publication of the results, shares increased by nearly 2 percent, with markets expecting the sales reduction based on poor weather and reduced consumer spending.

M&S moves to develop online presence after recognising failures

M&S saves £185 million through sustainability plan

A compromise in security at two Indian based card-processing companies, ElectraCard Services and EnStage, has resulted in multi-million dollar financial thefts across continents.

A total of £29.5 million was stolen across multiple locations by a group of individuals who succeeded in raising withdrawal limits on cards based on information from the two Indian based card-processing companies.

The security breach has called into question the levels of security within large banking firms and the risks of offshoring sensitive processes and data to high-risk locations.

The risk of cyber security and banking processes in locations such as India is a major concern for financial institutions, with over three-quarters if global banks having a presence in the country.

Despite the risks of offshoring, cyber security and financial security breaches are still common in the U.S. and other western countries, despite a perceived higher standard of security.

Indian IT companies faced with rising U.S. costs

India and Germany boost links through language education program

RBS is to invest a further £450 million on IT this year, in addition to a annual IT budget of £2 billion. The move comes as the financial giant seeks to draw a line under past public IT failing.

One significant IT failing was the disruption to online banking services during the summer of 2012, which led to many RBS customers being left unable to access their accounts.

The disruption led to a cost of £175 million for customer reimbursement for any losses sustained. RBS have warned that losses incurred from the outage may still be forthcoming.

The bank has faced further outages since 2012, with application difficulties on mobile devices.

RBS Group chairman Philip Hampton said: “the IT incidents over the last year have shown, building and maintaining a top class infrastructure is fundamental".

Regulators move to investigate RBS IT failings

Hardware failure found to be responsible for NatWest outage