The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched an investigation into whether online gambling companies are breaking the law, regarding the difficulties some customers have collecting their winnings. It is believed over 5 million Brits regularly play online and increasingly complex rules to do with redeeming winnings and that comprise ‘misleading’ offers may actually be violating the law.
Bombardier, the Canadian plane and train maker have announced the second significant job cut this year; announcing 7,500 positions will be lost in an attempt to cut costs. 2/3 will be in rail and the rest in aerospace. This follows the initial job cuts proposed in February that planned 7,000 job losses. The firm employs a large number of Europeans as well as Canadians, and accounts for 10% of Northern Irish manufacturing exports, where it employs 6,000 people. In the rest of the UK the firm employs a further 3,500 people.
British American Tobacco, who need no further description, have announced they’re planning a merger with US partner Reynolds in a deal worth $47bn. This would buy BAT the 57.8% share in Reynolds they don’t currently own, bringing together some of the industry’s best known brands like Lucky Strike, Camel and Rothmans. BAT reckon they can make £400m worth of cost-savings as a result of the merger. After initially climbing BAT shares closed the day down by 2.85%, the furthest faller on the FTSE 100 on Friday. The index as a whole lacked any direction throughout the session, with little meaningful data on Friday the prime reason. The index closed -0.09% down for the day and closes the week barely different to where we began on Monday.
US markets have began their session marginally down as the dollar hits eight-month highs against a basket of currencies, with investors weighing the likelihood of a US rate hike by the end of the year, on a day the euro hit 7-month lows v a similar basket. Some rhetoric around investors seeing an increased likelihood of a rate rise comes as the probability of a Trump election win decreases. Wall Street’s moves come despite Microsoft hitting an all time high following better than expected results after focusing on cloud based services. The shares hit $60.75 after hours Thursday, even higher than their price during the tech bubble. Their future hope ‘intelligent cloud’ business was 8% higher YoY earning $6.4bn in the latest quarter;
(Google Finance)