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Let's take a look at some stocks on the move today in Europe. I'm Stephen Carrol but Caroline Hepger and we're joined by Bloomberg reporter Chloe Mele. Chloe, good morning. Let's start this morning with Unilever pondering whether to put its portfolio on a diet. Yes, absolutely so.
Unilva is as said to be considering the separation of its food assets, and so that includes some very well known names like the like nor Stock Cubes, a Mami, Talman's mayonnaise. And this potential separation of those food assets fits really well within the strategy under the new CEO, which has really been about moving away from food and
really refocusing on beauty and personal care instead. And so the reasoning behind this is that people are still very much struggling with the cost of living, and they're moving more and more away from those household names and those household brands and moving more towards a cheaper store brands, for example. And then there's also have caused a GLP one a side of this where we have got more and more people on those OBC shots maybe eating less,
eating less calorie dense stuff. And then on the other hand, we've got beauty, which is where there's potentially more opportunities. We've got you know, things like multi step skincare routines. The older population is also a key demographic needed maybe more anti aging stuff. So there's a lot of opportunities there for the beauty space. And so within this context, you know, Leva started really moving away from food. It's
already sold a bunch of brands recently. It's also we have the spinoff of, of course, of the Magnum ice cream, a brand last year. But what some analyists are saying is that there's actually really little appetite right now for such a big transformation, and of quiz so quickly after the spinoff of Magnum, given the uncertainty it could create internally potentially, So maybe that explains was shares a little bit down this morning as investors try and really digest what this means for Unileva.
Okay, that's interesting, you live on all of the various beauty permutations, right Let's also talk about Hello Fresh shares plunging to a record low after the meal kits talked about sales. What have they been saying?
Yeah, HelloFresh is actually really struggling to kind of get back to the glory days of the pandemic when everyone was ordering those meal kits from them. It had already released some disappointing numbers for twenty twenty five with sales declining, and then today it also issued some disappointing twenty twenty six guidance, So it said that sales will be declining as much as six percent this year, which was worse than what analysts had expected, and it blamed two things
for that in particular. So the meal kit category is actually showing some improvement, but where there's real weakness is actually the ready to eat a segment, and so there had been some operational issues of perditional bottlenegs there and those got resolved, but it really had a long term impact on customer attention, and so that will be really
weighing on the performance of that segment this year. And then the other big thing is something that it had already flagged previously, which is that there were really bad snowstorms in the US in particular in the first quarter, and so that had led to canceled deliveries, some customer refunds as well, and then also higher production costs and HelloFresh said that it would use those snowstorm would would
impact the first quarter performance are quite a bit. So for investors, this was really disappointing and shares, as you mentioned, hit a record low, and some analysts are saying now that the company is essentially facing a decrease in customer base and so that means that a turnaround is going to be kind of less and less likely.
And the next STOC is one Chloe that sent me running straight to the DS function on the terminal diploma. PRC had to look up what they do. They distribute to manufacturer, building components and special c Their share is the best performing company on the FORTS one hundred this century. What's driving them higher today?
Yeah, so it's one of those companies that are just maybe not as exciting, but that really do very well. So, as you mentioned, they manufacture seals and wires and things like that for the energy, life sciences, and aerospace industries, and that seems to be a great business to be in, given that they just boosted guidance quite significantly today, which has been driving those shares this morning. So it seems that the aerospace and defense segment in particular is driving
that performance. There's also some good contributions from nuclear power customers. The life sciences segment is a little bit weaker, but the rest is really offsetting that. Diploma also makes a lot of acquisitions of smaller companies, and it said the pipeline was quite positive, so that explains how well it has been performing, and they'll probably just keep going in that trajectory.
The Stock Movers report from Bloomberg Radio. Check back with us throughout the day for the latest roundup of companies making news on Wall Street and for the latest market moving headlines. Listen to Bloomberg Radio Live, catch us on YouTube, Bloomberg dot com, and on Applecarplay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app.