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Let's take a look at some stocks on the move today in your I'm Tom McKenzie alongside Stephen Carroll. We are joined by Bloomberg reporter Chloe Mellie Chloe. We start with Shell third caught a profit better than expected at a time of weaker oil prices. What's going on?
Yeah, So, as you said, weaker energy prices that dragged down and a little bit we saw that with Equinoy yesterday. But what was helped for Shell was that there was a rebound in performance by its oil and gas traders. So last month Shell had already said that oil and gas trading profits had actually recovered, and that was after Shall and also a lot of its peers that really struggled to navigate the really sharp market swings that we saw over the second quarter that were of course driven
by a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. Shall also in the pace of share buy bags, which is something that investors care a lot about when it comes to those oil majors, and that really reassured the market. It seems that the overall the CEO's strategy has been working out quite well for Shell. He's been spending the past couple of years cutting costs and getting rid of underperforming assets to try and close that valuation gap with US rivals, and so
far that seems to be working quite well. Our shares are up sixteen percent since the start of twenty twenty five and outperforming it's peers. So everything is going quite well for SHALL so far. We'll see how BP actually does next week.
Yeah, inde chall share is just down half of one percent this morning in London. The big share move though on the London market has been WPP, currently down around ten percent, but the hit shares hit. They're lower since two thousand and eight earlier as well. What's driving those shares lower this morning.
Well, it cut it's sales guidance and that is something that I had already done in July, so this is now the second cut this year. And they also announced that it would revamp its entire structure to try and become more efficient. So this is the first set of results under the new CEO, Cindy Rose, who started just last month on September the first, and she's now got
quite a massive, massive task ahead of her. She needs to make some really big changes to kind of reverse what has been a very weak performance for a while for WPP. It's fallen way behind its big rival, Publicist, which actually upgraded guidance this season, so we can see how we've got two very diverging paths there, and it's also seen the loss of some really major accounts for the WPP. So now Rose is having to kind of adapt the agency to a new environment where AI tools
are really changing the advertising world. And we've also seen a lot of reduced client spending on marketing because of macroeconomic uncertainty. So a CEO called the recent performance unacceptable and she said she'd have to make really big changes, and now we'll announce that plan in the new year, so we'll see how that goes.
Okay, So from advertising to the auto makers and geopolitics hitting the German giant Volkswagen.
Yeah, so Volkswagen said that it would need a sufficient supply of semiconductors to be able to meet its financial targets for twenty twenty five. So that's all related to this whole experior at debacle, so it's a really clear signal that the shortage of chips from an experior is
having a major impact on those European carmakers. Volkswagen said that it had secured enough components for the coming week to keep the German production plants running, but that it couldn't rule out disruption to production beyond at that time,
so that's obviously a big negative. But actually shares did gain this morning because there was a really strong free cash flow and really strong margin in the earning, so as some anlist said that that really sets the stage for a potential reset in twenty twenty six, which echoes what we had from Mercedes yesterday with the shares rising because investors were expecting the worst to kind of be behind. So it seems to be maybe the light of the end of the tunnel for their European car sector.
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