Ailing department store chain El Corte Ingles lived splendidly before Amancio Ortega, Zara’s founder, began his rapid journey through the world of fashion retailing both at home and abroad. Galicia’s Inditex group has not stopped growing in sales and store openings.
S&P has cut its outlook for Banco Popular to Negative from Stable (where it placed the bank on February 9), which opens the door to new rating trims. At the same time, Popular will hold its AGM today where the 2016 accounts (losses of €3.485 billion) are due to be approved by shareholders,
The Colombian government has finally decided to liquidate the electricity distributor Electricaribe, controlled by Gas Natural Fenosa. The company was intervened by the government last November, as a temporary preventitive measure.
Sonia Ruiz de Garibay (GVC Gaesco) |Spain’s hotel chains NH Hoteles and Meliá are reaping the benefits of their restructuring and the adjustments made in the areas of operating costs and debt reduction. So these stocks are a good bet for locking in profits thanks to their attractive trading ratios.
Emilio Saracho, who will take over the reins of Banco Popular in less than 15 days, may not want to go ahead with Project Sunrise, which consists of setting up a small ‘bad bank’ into which € 6 billion worth of property loans would be transferred. The new chairman may have a Plan B.
The environment for European banks is changing for the better. The sector’s fundamentals are improving and Bankinter sees the recent ‘impasse’ in their trading performance as a buy oportunity.
As a result of the global financial crisis, funding conditions for SMEs in the peripheral European countries tightened considerably. But following the implementation of expansionary monetary policies, including TLTROs and negative interest rates, has loan activity improved for small businesses in countries like Spain, where they are key drivers for economic growth and job creation.
While acknowledging that Spanish renewable energy and engineering firm Abengoa’s restructuring plan would ease its debt burden, Moody’s has cast doubts over whether it will be successful. Earlier this month, Abengoa reached a debt restructuring deal with its main creditors in an attempt to avoid Spain’s biggest ever bankruptcy. It had been in talks with lenders since November 2015 to reduce its over 9 billion euros debt pile.
Some accounting data from US companies offers an interesting reading: there is no doubt that the behaviour of listed companies has changed with the crisis. But what is even more important is that there was a structural change quite a bit before that. US companies are now increasingly less focused on investment in tangible capital and are quickly moving towards capital which is more intangible and/or financial.
Repsol has doubled its recurrent synergies from 220 million dollars annually to 400, thanks to its purchase of Canadian oil firm Talisman. But the transaction has also resulted in a 5.5 billion dollars arbitration notice being served against it by the Chinese company Sinopec.