Company
LON:WTB
Whitbread PLC is the UK's largest hotel and restaurant company operating businesses in the budget hotels and restaurant sectors. Its brands include Premier Inn, Beefeater, Table Table, Brewers Fayre and Taybarns. Whitbread PLC employs over 33,000 people and serves 8.5 million customers every month in its 1500 outlets across the UK.
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The Day Ahead will bring updates from the likes of Primark-owner Associated British Foods, a caffeine-free Whitbread, credit checker Experian, and software firm Sage
Investments and investor services
Footsie closed down over 63 points at 6,855 on the day
Barclays upgraded its rating on Whitbread to ‘overweight’ from ‘equal weight’ and raised its target price to 5,200p from 5,000p
The FTSE 100 firm said it had received clearance from China’s State Administration for Market Regulation to sell its Costa operations in the country
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The value of a conglomerate is almost always less than the combined value of its subsidiaries, which is why firms such as Smiths and Whitbread are spinning off some of their assets
Investments and investor services
Sainsbury, Superdry and Burberry are among the names in the diary for Thursday.
The sale of Costa should leave Whitbread with about £2.9bn to allocate to shareholders and acquisitions after paying down debt and topping up the pension pot, says Liberum.
"The combination of our commitment to the investment programme and the current UK consumer environment naturally means our near-term profit growth may be lower than in previous years," Whitbread said
"Global stocks have swung sharply lower, amid growing fears about the health of the Chinese economy and a slew of geopolitical concerns – UK, Italy and Saudi Arabia."
The group said rooms will cost from £19 a night - Premier Inn prices typically start at £49 - and will be less than half the size of a standard Premier Inn room, at 8.5 square metres
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Aside from Whitbead's interim results, the day ahead will also bring updates from the likes of St James's Place, Travis Perkins, Anglo American, and Bunzl
Whitbread has continued to evolve since starting out as a beer brewing business
According to Reuters, the group wants to get rid of the operation manager post at all of its hotels and reinvest the cost savings into new site openings
Barclays’ analysts said the significant value unlocked by Whitbread’s move to sell its Costa Coffee chain for £3.9bn to Cola-Cola gives the UK firm “interesting optionality”
Analysts long argued that it made little sense for Whitbread to keep both Costa and Premier Inn under the same roof, and calls are growing for AB Foods to spin off Primark, its star asset
“Whitbread investors may miss the caffeine highs Costa serves up," Hargreaves Lansdown said of the group's decision to sell the coffee chain to Coca-Cola
A look at some of the biggest risers and fallers in London on Friday
The company said it plans to return a “significant majority” of proceeds from the disposal to shareholders
European benchmarks also took a big hit, while on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down around 80 points
Halfords said Woodhouse, finance director at the John Lewis Partnership's upmarket supermarket chain since 2015, will start as its CFO on November 1
