Good morning! It's Paul here.

Please note that I added more sections to yesterday's report in the evening - on Eve Sleep, Ten Entertainment, and Epwin. I know it's not ideal doing that, but I find it very difficult to concentrate on writing when the market is open.

No preamble today, as there are too many company results to cover.

Last call for questions for my interview with Spreadex tomorrow. I need your questions in by midnight tonight please, to give me time to prepare. Should be an interesting audiocast. Please submit questions only using this form. Thanks!




Interserve (LON:IRV)

Share price: 83p (down 45.5% today)
No. shares: 145.7m
Market cap: £120.9m

Trading update (profit warning) - this is the biggest percentage faller of the day. Yet another profit warning, from this accident-prone international support services and construction group.

To refresh my memory, I've looked back at the archive. I wrote a piece here on 6 May 2016, on a horrible profit warning (causing the shares to drop 20% to 313p). My conclusion then was that this share was uninvestable, because management were not in control of the business. It would have been a good short at the time.

I've not followed the company since then. Today it delivers more bad news;

Trading in the UK in July and August was disappointing, particularly in support services, but also in the construction division.

As a result of this, the Board now believes that the outturn for the year will be significantly below its previous expectations.


To quantify this, Stockopedia currently has a broker consensus EPS figure for 2017 of 57.1p. What does "significantly below" mean? It could be anything really. I would take that as meaning at least 20% below expectations, possibly more.

Broker notes - I've seen two broker notes this morning. One says they're working on updated figures. The other says that they're withdrawing forecasts, as there are too many uncertainties. That sounds wise.


There's more bad news on what look like exceptional exit costs;

Further progress continues to be made on contracts within our exited Energy from Waste business. However, the anticipated timing and complexities of completion mean that the Board now considers it likely that the final costs will significantly exceed the…

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