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Let's have a think about what individual stocks are moving. So let us look at the individual names on the move today here in Europe. I'm Caroline Hepga and I'm joined by Bloomberg reporter Climberla. Good morning. The start of our conversation will be Reno some good ratings guy and who from.
Yeah SO has one beck its investment grade of status from SMP SO. SMP has said that Reno had managed to really refresh its product lineup and broaden its presence outside of Europe, and so those two things should really help with revenue growth and with volumes over the next couple of years. And this is really your vote of confidence for the new CEO started just over the summer. He's been very careful with costs, so that's been a
big part of his strategy. And he also said that he really wanted to expand in markets like Latin America and India rather than a China in the US because of that quite weak demand in Europe. And so this strategy seems to be paying off, and this rating upgrade this morning really boosted the shares for Reno, and this is much needed relief for a company that's not been
having the best year. Of course, alongside the rest of that, carmaking a sector in Europe that's obviously been struggling quite a bit, but this seems to be a company that's on the road to recovery.
Perhaps.
Okay, let's think about European sportswear and Puma in particular.
Yeah, so what's happening with Nike over in the US is not good news for Puma essentially. So Nike has worn that sales would be much weaker for this quarter, the war quarter that is starting that started on December the first, and that is because of lower demand for
its Converse brand and also weak sales in China. So this doesn't bode very well for Puma because they also have a huge market in China, and this seems like there's no recovery yet in consumer sentiment in that country, with a customers continuing to kind of cut back on that discretionary spending, and Nike is more exposed to that than brands like Adidas and a Sports for example, a local Chinese brand, because Nike has failed to really deliver
a big, kind of standout model, and Chinese consumers also increasingly want kind of very niche performance features that Nike has not been able to deliver. And this is also a problem for Puma because it's also a company that's struggled to launch a product that really captures consumers attention, and so that's probably going to be a big problem moving forward for Puma as well, and we have seen those shares are struggling this morning on the back of.
That interesting I was just reading GQ's article and look at trainers for twenty twenty six. I need a pair of trainers. So it happened to look at what the trends are going to be and apparently I'm told weirder, chunky, ballet trainers, all sorts of things. Yeah, anyway, it's happening, yeah, under training department.
Right.
Let's also think about this FCA probe of a well known company in the UK.
Yeah, so wh Smith is facing a probe. W Smith is having a real tough time at the moment. So we remember, of course, the accounting era from a few months back, where it revealed that it had overstated its result in the North American and North American business, so it had overstated it by thirty million pounds. And since then that has triggered a bunch of setbacks for the company.
We've seen shares plunging, We've they've had to delay their results twice, they've had to cut their outlook twice as well.
The CEO resigned and today there's obviously yet another setback with the financial regulator in the UK, the FCA, opening an investigation into the company, and the FCA can take enforcement actions when the companies have misleading public announcements, and so it had fined Tesco, for example, about one hundred and thirty million pounds back in twenty seventeen for overstating results. So we'll see what the investigation actually actually triggers for
wh Smith. So it has this probe, and then it also has cut its annual dividend for the first time since the pandemics. We've got two big setbacks for the company this morning. That's not going to help the shares which are down about more than forty percent a year today, and that of course doesn't really help with credibility and makes it difficult for wh Smith to move forward, at least for now.
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