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The Stock Movers Report, your roundup of companies making moves in the stock market, harnessing the power of Bloomberg Data.
Let's take a look at some stocks on the move today in Europe. I'm Stephen Carroll and I'm joined by Bloomberg's Breaking News editor, Louise Moon. Louise, good morning. Plenty of earnings to dig into today. Let's start with Whitbread.
Yeah, so this is the premiere in owner amongst hosts of other hotels in the UK. So they are embarking on a huge overhaul and this has essentially been sparked by activist pressure. So the activist investor, Carvex Management, took a stake at the end of last year and have been pushing for a rethink to Whitbread strategic review that had kind of already been ongoing, sparked by the Labor government's budget in the UK and the higher taxes from that.
So they've announced a change to their strategic review this morning, essentially cutting back on spending and selling hotels to eventually reward shareholders. So it's a five year plan to generate two billion pounds in free cash flow and they're going to give that other aiming to give that back to shareholders. By twenty thirty one, they'll recycle, in their words, so sell and lease back one point five billion pounds worth
of their freehold hotel properties. They're also going to convert their branded restaurants, so ones like Befeta in the UK with hotel based food and drink offerings. So they say that all of these measures could lead to a one billion pound cost reduction.
It will also result or could also result.
They're expecting it to result in about three thy eight hundred job losses. That's about thirteen percent of its workforce, so really cutting back kind of across the board. Before it achieves all of that, they've paused by backs for twenty twenty seven, and shares initially fell twelve percent, which was the most since twenty twenty. They did then pair loss,
but they initially fell twelve percent on the expectation. There's the analysts noting the expectation that this restructuring will weigh on the earnings, also noting that pause of buyback for the moment and saying that there's some risk of downgrades after mixed results.
They also had their four year results today.
And then there was a comment from CEO kind of acknowledging this, saying that there will be a short term reaction, but he's saying he's really confident for the medium term. So kind of total overhaul for Whitbread there very interesting.
Let's go to car makers next, and Volkswagon.
Also pledging more cost cuts.
Essentially very tough competition primarily from Chinese car makers, to the likes of Byd and the CFO noting that in particular this morning they had their first quarter results coming in weaker and shares falling. Shares have been really volatile over the past year. Volkswagener has been contending with the whole host of issues, including tariffs and this competition from China. So a lot of these companies like Boyd coming into
Europe building new plants, new car making plants. The EU put import Harris and China made evs, so that's encouraging that even more. They are working on restrictions to encourage a lot more local production. But essentially this is hitting a lot of the European car makers. That's on top of an overall kind of sluggish market anyway for evs, So Volkswagen are saying they planned to be more efficient. They already made progress on this during the first quarter,
but they kind of reiterated those plans. They're going to downsize global operators and their output, reduce a lot of complexity in the business and some of their model variants, and they're aiming essentially to boost savings as a result of that. So real pressure is being seen on the business. Okay, and quickly on air France KLM, Yeah, really interesting. So they're expecting their fuel bill to increase by two point four billion euros this year due to the Middle East conflicts.
That will take it to a total of nine point three billion euros. Also planning into rain costs even more. As a result of that, they've trimmed their capacity outlook. They say that those price increases aren't yet being seen results, but they are expected to wait in the coming quarters. So not good news in that. Sounds of really interesting. Takeaway Shares however, did rise. They're taking a lot of actions to kind of mitigate this and the impact that this will have.
On the business.
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