This week Inditex approved the appointment of Baroness Denise Kingsmill to its board of directors, as well as a long-term incentive plan, in cash and shares, for up to 600 company executives, including chairman Pablo Isla. The company also said it will not alter any plans it has for the UK despite Brexit.
The 25 non-financial companies listed on the Ibex 35 index have achieved something in 2015 which many considered as impossible: reducing their debt ratio. And they have done this despite the fact that their net income was lower than the previous year. According to BME (Bolsas y Mercados Españoles) their financial debt was 38% of liabilities, compared with 44.3% in 2014.
The Spanish wind energy company will start to operate in the Dutch market with an agreement to provide 11 MW and has also signed other five in France, Italy and Greece to install about 72 MW. Gamesa Dutch project entails replacing old turbines in different wind farms –three G58-850 kW units and ten G52-850 kW units.
Despite the rumours, top Spanish Bank Santander -Eurozone’s 2nd largest by market cap- will indeed complete this year the merger of its asset management fund (Santander AM) with Pioneer Investments, Italian UniCredit’s subsidiary, once the operation meets the regulatory and legal requirements. A EUR5.3 bn deal that has been simmering for more than 20 months.
At end-2015, Spanish banks and savings banks had barely a quarter of the holding in Spanish companies’ shares it had in 1992, the first year in the historical series elaborated by BME’s Rearch Department. The current share of 3.6% is 12 percentage points lower than that in 1992 and 5.8 percentage points below the level in 2007, at the start of the global financial crisis.
BARCLAYS | While in large parts descriptive, Tecnicas’s recent analyst day highlighted the controls that the company has in place, the shock to the system as proved to be sub-optimal in Canada and the efforts put in place to ensure that these don’t repeat.
Spain is one of the countries in the EU where its big businessmen remain in their posts the longest. Despite the fact that Emilio Botin is gone and Alierta and Villar Mir have left, the average age of Spain’s top businessmen is still higher than in France (56.6 years), the US (58.8 years) and the UK (55.8 years).
Out of the 33 banks subjected to the Federal Reserve’s stress tests, 31 have passed this year, which means they will be able to increase their dividends and share buybacks. On the other hand, Deutsche Bank and Banco Santander failed the tests due to the Fed’s doubts about their capacity to measure risk.
The rise in the Ibex 35 in the first few minutes of Monday’s session, when it rose 3% to over 8,000 points could not last. And it didn’t. Half an hour after the market opened, it began its downward spiral once again towards the 7,700 level. It lost over 2% and stayed there almost until the close, with the fall mirrored in the rest of the European exchanges.
Before the crisis, Metrovacesa was one of the five big Spanish property companies, born out of Madrid’s expansion with the construction of the underground in the first few decades of the XXth century.