Manufacturing Purchasing Manufacturing Indices – PMIs if you want to be informal – are flooding out today, and there's been some good news on the UK front.
The UK factory PMI sprang a surprise in October, rising to a 16-month high on the back of a recovery in export orders.
The Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing PMI advanced to 55.5 from 51.8 in September, comfortably ahead of the consensus forecast from economists of 52.5.
“The huge out=performance of the UK manufacturing PMI gives yet another nod to [Bank of England governor] Mark Carney that the UK economy is booming, despite a weaker-than-expected Q3 GDP [gross domestic product] figure last week,” suggested Josh Mahony at spread betting firm IG.
The October gain was among the biggest monthly gains seen since the inception of the survey 24 years ago, but widely quoted economist Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight advises us all not to get too carried away, given the “extremely weak” Confederation of British Industry monthly and quarterly survey for October.
“The manufacturing survey raises hopes that UK GDP growth can regain momentum in the fourth quarter after slowing to 0.5% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter from 0.7% in the second quarter. However, much will clearly depend on how well the dominant services sector performs,” Archer cautions.
The Daily Mail reports that we could soon fly from London to Sydney in four hours if Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines successfully develops an engine that combines jet and rocket technologies.
The firm has been backed by BAE Systems (LON:BA.), which is taking a 20% stake in Reaction Engines.
Elsewhere in the airline sector, Ryanair (LON:RYA) reckons lower fares will drive faster traffic growth in the second half of its financial year.
The company said traffic grew 13% to 58mln passengers carried in the six months to the end of September, as the load factor jumped four percentage points.
Profit before tax in the period, excluding exceptional items, eased to €1.24mln from €1.56mln the year before.
“We have enjoyed a bumper summer due to a very rare confluence of favourable events including stronger sterling, adverse weather in northern Europe, reasonably flat industry capacity and further savings on our unhedged fuel, as millions of customers switched to Ryanair for our Always Getting Better (AGB) customer experience programme,” said Michael O'Leary, the loquacious chief executive of Ryanair.
Morrisons (LON:MRW), the struggling supermarket chain, has grabbed itself some good publicity by revealing it will donate all food in its stores that is past its 'best before' date to charity organisations rather than shipping it off to landfill.
The scheme has already been successfully trialled in 112 stores in Yorkshire and the North-East, and is now being rolled out across the entire Morrisons estate.
The company is releasing a quarterly trading update on Thursday and US broker Jefferies is expecting a 2% fall in like-for-like sales from a year ago.
The retailer has become the latest supermarket to try to muscle in on the high street ready-to-eat sandwich market,
Morrisons believes that supermarkets’ “limp and soggy” pre-packed sandwiches are putting consumers off, with research showing that 62% of people would eat more sandwiches if they were made freshly.
Especially if they were available for free from a food bank, presumably.
Among the tiddlers, Haydale Graphene's (LON:HAYD) results and share issue have caught the attention of private investors on a well-known stock market news site.
When the top line increases more than tenfold, that is bound to attract the attention, and even if most of that gain was down to a shrewd acquisition, like-for-like income more than doubled to £0.30mln from £0.13mln.