Pre 8 a.m. comments
Inland Homes (LON:INL) announces that it has been successful in the first round of the Government's "Build To Rent" scheme, under which builders can borrow the money to build new houses. Sounds like a good scheme to kick-start some desperately-needed new housing in the South East especially. The statement refers to a £15m loan across two sites for Inland, which is a material amount relative to the size of company, so will be good news if this goes ahead.
Lavendon (LON:LVD) provide rental of powered access equipment ("cherry pickers" & similar), and have issued an in line with expectations Interim Management Statement (IMS) for the calendar year to date. Interestingly, they state that poor demand in Europe (partly due to bad weather) has been offset by strong demand in the Middle East. This seems to be a trend, as I've heard that from several other companies recently. So one increasingly feels that companies need to have a global footprint, or at least operate in growth areas outside of Europe, to offset weakness in Europe which must surely continue indefinitely until the Eurozone crisis is brought closer to resolution?
Share (LON:SHRE) issue a Q1 "Market share and trading update". Unless I've missed something, it doesn't actually say anything about profitability, so seems pointless. It mentions market share gains, and has some interesting background about market sentiment (they are an online stockbroker), but a trading statement is pretty useless if it doesn't tell you whether profits are above, equal to or below expectations.
Post 8 a.m. comments
I didn't spot it on my first sweep of the morning's announcements, but the IMS from Filtronic (LON:FTC) looks good. They "design and manufacture microwave electronics products for the wireless telecoms infrastructure market", which sounds impressive!
Their year end is 31 May, and the IMS covers H2 to date. The key sentence is that "the Board expects that revenues and profits for the Group as a whole will exceed market expectations, with revenues expected to be in the region of £38.5m".
Stockopedia shows consensus forecast of £36.0m and 3.4p normalised EPS, so it looks like a 7% out-performance at the top line, and allowing for operational gearing that might drop through to (finger in…
