NEW YORK | Microsoft entered the battle for the e-readers this week thanks to a strategic partnership with Barnes & Noble. Their alliance, dubbed as NewCo, gives Windows creator a 17.6 percent equity stake for a $300 million investment and values B&N’s remaining 82.4% stake at $1.4 billion. According to Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew Fassler, the deal is a “game-changer.” “The shift to digital is putting the world’s libraries and…
MADRID | The Spanish global infrastructure company Ferrovial has published its results for the first quarter of 2012. The firm said it obtained €192 million of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation compared with €172 million in the first three months of last year, that is, a rise of 11.7%. In the first few months of 2012, Ferrovial’s main businesses improved, particularly revenues at its British division Amey, and international construction, mainly Budimex. Revenues amounted to…
MADRID | Banco Santander registered a net attributable profit of €1.604 billion in the first quarter of 2012, a decline of 24% year on year. Santander, that released Thursday its results for the January-March period of this year, noted that this decline was mainly due to the significant increase in provisions for non-performing loans, which rose by 51% to €3.127 billion. Banco Santander revenues in the first quarter grew by more than…
MADRID | Morgan Stanley in Madrid released an investor note on Tuesday with some recommendations, and we spotted a couple of Spanish companies (always on the bright side, we know…) “We propose the following basket of 64 stocks (Nifty Fifty +) with the intent to replicate the behaviour on the original list (Nifty Fifty) for the years 60/70 in the U.S. “The criteria we used for this stock selection exercise are:…
MADRID/LONDON | BAA, the company owned by a Spain’s Ferrovial-led consortium and that manages most airports in the UK, announced Monday the sale of its 100% interest in Edinburgh Airport Limited. The asset will be acquired by Global Infrastructure Partners GIP for £807.2 million, which surpasses in some £200 million estimations made in advance by analysts in the Madrid financial City. The news was favourably received by most experts. In several investor…
MADRID | Ferrovial Agroman, a construction subsidiary of Ferrovial, was awarded a contract to build the Padornelo Tunnel-Lubián section of the Madrid-Galicia high-speed railway line, for €108.8 million. The section of line, which is 7.6 kilometers long and will have a single-track 8.5-meter wide bed, crosses the Requejo and Lubián municipalities, in Zamora province. The project includes the construction of the right gallery of the Pardonelo Tunnel (6,407 meters long) and galleries…
MADRID | The US market once again knocked on the doors of the Spanish railway equipment manufacturer CAF. The company, based in Guipuzcoa (Basque Country) will supply trains for the rail project in the city of Cincinnati, in the State of Ohio. In an initial phase, the company will manufacture a small number of vehicles, which it will also keep updated. So far, CAF has been chosen as preferred supplier and will now negotiate…
LONDON/MADRID | Sheffield City Council in England announced that Ferrovial Services’ subsidiary Amey was the preferred bidder for a contract to maintain the city’s infrastructure in a project worth £2 billion or €2.425 billion in revenues. The contract includes a 5-year programme of upgrade works, followed by maintenance for 25 years. The Ferrovial Services subsidiary will take responsibility for 1,900 km of road, 68,000 street lights, 500 traffic signals, 600 bridges and other structures, 2,400 retaining walls…
MADRID, LONDON | Emilio Botin will be re-elected on Saturday as board director and president of the Spanish financial group, currently third in the domestic rank after Caixabank and BBVA. But he got today a special gift via London: Banco Santander was named ‘Business Bank of the Year’ in the UK at the annual Business Moneyfacts Awards for its strategy to become the small and medium-sized companies’ bank of choice. It was the…
MADRID | Marcelino Fernández Verdes was appointed Thursday chief operating officer of Hochtief, the German division of the Spanish group ACS. Fernández will sit at the executive committee of Hochtief (Vorstand) with CEO Frank Stieler and CFO Peter Sassenfeld. He will address risk management operations of the entire group Hochtief, but will also face the responsibility of breaking the spiralling downward trend its Australian branch Leighton has fallen into. The move…