DS Smith, down 0.2%, announced that it has completed the proposed acquisition of Parish Manufacturing Inc. Numis Securities restated its “Add” rating on the stock with a target price of 465p, while Citigroup Inc. gave a slightly lower target price of 453p.
Shore Capital restated its “Buy” rating on Greene King, down 1.5%. J P Morgan Chase & Co restated its “Neutral” rating on Abcam, down 2.7%, with a target price of 678p.
Peel Hunt restated its “Add” rating on Bango, up 20%, with a target price of 100p. Brady, up 9.2%, announced that its trading remained in line with the market expectations.
CyanConnode Holdings, up 7.2%, announced in its trading update for the year ended 31 December 2016 that revenue for the period surged by approximately 560% to £1.8m, compared to the previous year, led by the PVVNL and CESC deployments in India. Trading for the period remained in line with the management expectations. The Group expects to move into the delivery phase of the purchase order worth £10m for smart metering from Micromodje in 2017. The stock was subjected to mostly “Buy” rating from brokers.
RhythmOne, up 2.6%, announced that it has successfully completed the proposed acquisition of Perk Inc. Numis Securities reiterated its “Buy” rating on the stock with a target price of 52p. LPA Group, up 1.1%, announced that its full year revenue surged to £21.4m from £16.3m reported, as compared to previous year. The company’s profit before tax stood at £1.5m, compared to profit of £0.793m reported in the last year.
Sepura, which remained unchanged at 19.5p, announced that it has reached agreement with Hytera Communications Limited for sale of the company to Project Shortway Limited (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hytera), for 20p in cash per share of Sepura.
Beaufort Securities reconfirmed its “Speculative Buy” rating on Horizon Discovery Group, down 0.3%, with a target price of 200p, whereas Panmure Gordon restated its “Buy” rating on the stock with a target price of 205p.
Citigroup Inc. reissued its “Buy” rating on AVEVA Group, down 2.5%, with a target price of 2080p, whereas Credit Suisse Group raised its target price on the stock by 300p to 2200p and reaffirmed its “Outperform” rating. Numis Securities reiterated its “Add” rating on the stock with a target price of 2050p.
Frontier Developments, down 10.4%, had their rating from Numis Securities downgraded to “Hold” with a target price of 300p.
UK markets closed mostly lower for the week, amid hard Brexit concerns, looming protectionists policies of President Trump and the growth in the housing market slowing down more than anticipated in the last month. Meanwhile, the nation’s consumer price index unexpectedly climbed in December, hitting its highest level since July 2014. The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, gave a speech this week on the UK’s Brexit objectives, in which she confirmed that Britain would leave the European Union single market. The FTSE 100 fell 1.9% to 7,198.4, while the FTSE AIM 100 index eased 0.7% to close at 4,161.6. The FTSE techMARK 100 index declined 1.7% to 4,278.4.
US markets finished in the negative territory for the week, despite robust macro-economic releases on consumer price index, industrial output and capacity utilisation for December. The Federal Reserve Chairwoman, Janet Yellen, stated that over the next three years, US interest rates would gradually increase. The DJIA index lost 0.3% to 19,827.3, while the NASDAQ index decreased 0.3% to 5,555.3.
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