Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News, The.
Speaker 2: Stock Mover's Report, your roundup of companies making moves in
Speaker 2: the stock market, harnessing the power of Bloomberg data.
Speaker 3: Let's take a look at some stocks on the move
Speaker 3: today in your I'm Tom McKenzie alongside Stephen Carroll. We
Speaker 3: are joined by Bloomberg reporter Chloe Mellie Chloe. We start
Speaker 3: with Shell third caught a profit better than expected at
Speaker 3: a time of weaker oil prices. What's going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, as you said, weaker energy prices that dragged
Speaker 1: down and a little bit we saw that with Equinoy yesterday.
Speaker 1: But what was helped for Shell was that there was
Speaker 1: a rebound in performance by its oil and gas traders.
Speaker 1: So last month Shell had already said that oil and
Speaker 1: gas trading profits had actually recovered, and that was after
Speaker 1: Shall and also a lot of its peers that really
Speaker 1: struggled to navigate the really sharp market swings that we
Speaker 1: saw over the second quarter that were of course driven
Speaker 1: by a lot of geopolitical uncertainty. Shall also in the
Speaker 1: pace of share buy bags, which is something that investors
Speaker 1: care a lot about when it comes to those oil majors,
Speaker 1: and that really reassured the market. It seems that the
Speaker 1: overall the CEO's strategy has been working out quite well
Speaker 1: for Shell. He's been spending the past couple of years
Speaker 1: cutting costs and getting rid of underperforming assets to try
Speaker 1: and close that valuation gap with US rivals, and so
Speaker 1: far that seems to be working quite well. Our shares
Speaker 1: are up sixteen percent since the start of twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five and outperforming it's peers. So everything is going quite
Speaker 1: well for SHALL so far. We'll see how BP actually
Speaker 1: does next week.
Speaker 4: Yeah, inde chall share is just down half of one
Speaker 4: percent this morning in London. The big share move though
Speaker 4: on the London market has been WPP, currently down around
Speaker 4: ten percent, but the hit shares hit. They're lower since
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight earlier as well. What's driving those
Speaker 4: shares lower this morning.
Speaker 1: Well, it cut it's sales guidance and that is something
Speaker 1: that I had already done in July, so this is
Speaker 1: now the second cut this year. And they also announced
Speaker 1: that it would revamp its entire structure to try and
Speaker 1: become more efficient. So this is the first set of
Speaker 1: results under the new CEO, Cindy Rose, who started just
Speaker 1: last month on September the first, and she's now got
Speaker 1: quite a massive, massive task ahead of her. She needs
Speaker 1: to make some really big changes to kind of reverse
Speaker 1: what has been a very weak performance for a while
Speaker 1: for WPP. It's fallen way behind its big rival, Publicist,
Speaker 1: which actually upgraded guidance this season, so we can see
Speaker 1: how we've got two very diverging paths there, and it's
Speaker 1: also seen the loss of some really major accounts for
Speaker 1: the WPP. So now Rose is having to kind of
Speaker 1: adapt the agency to a new environment where AI tools
Speaker 1: are really changing the advertising world. And we've also seen
Speaker 1: a lot of reduced client spending on marketing because of
Speaker 1: macroeconomic uncertainty. So a CEO called the recent performance unacceptable
Speaker 1: and she said she'd have to make really big changes,
Speaker 1: and now we'll announce that plan in the new year,
Speaker 1: so we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 3: Okay, So from advertising to the auto makers and geopolitics
Speaker 3: hitting the German giant Volkswagen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Volkswagen said that it would need a sufficient
Speaker 1: supply of semiconductors to be able to meet its financial
Speaker 1: targets for twenty twenty five. So that's all related to
Speaker 1: this whole experior at debacle, so it's a really clear
Speaker 1: signal that the shortage of chips from an experior is
Speaker 1: having a major impact on those European carmakers. Volkswagen said
Speaker 1: that it had secured enough components for the coming week
Speaker 1: to keep the German production plants running, but that it
Speaker 1: couldn't rule out disruption to production beyond at that time,
Speaker 1: so that's obviously a big negative. But actually shares did
Speaker 1: gain this morning because there was a really strong free
Speaker 1: cash flow and really strong margin in the earning, so
Speaker 1: as some anlist said that that really sets the stage
Speaker 1: for a potential reset in twenty twenty six, which echoes
Speaker 1: what we had from Mercedes yesterday with the shares rising
Speaker 1: because investors were expecting the worst to kind of be behind.
Speaker 1: So it seems to be maybe the light of the
Speaker 1: end of the tunnel for their European car sector.
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