Royal Mail to cut 10,000 jobs, Ashmore AuM falls

London pre-open

The FTSE 100 was being called to open 70.7 points higher ahead of the bell on Friday after closing out the previous session 0.35% firmer at 6,850.27.

Stocks to watch

Royal Mail said on Friday that it was looking to cut 10,000 jobs by the end of August 2023 as it warned of financial losses due to industrial action and lower parcel volumes.

RM's parent company, the newly renamed International Distribution Services, said the job loss figure could include up to 6,000 redundancies and forecast an adjusted operating loss of around £350.0m for the current financial year - including the direct, immediate impact of eight days of industrial action but excluding any charges for voluntary redundancy costs.

Asset manager Ashmore said on Friday that total assets under management had fallen 12.5% in the three months ended 30 September as a result of $5.0bn in net outflows and a $3.0bn negative investment performance.

Ashmore said total assets under management dropped from $64.0bn at the end of June to $56.0bn in the third quarter, with the increase in net outflows predominantly stemming from institutional investors reducing exposure in the external debt, local currency and blended debt themes.

Newspaper round-up

Elon Musk is under a federal investigation related to his $44.0bn takeover of Twitter, the social media company has said in a court filing made public on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigation, it did not say what the focus was, or which federal authorities were investigating. – Guardian

Bankers' bonuses have doubled since the 2008 financial crash, according to research by the TUC, which accuses the government of enriching City financiers while "holding down" the pay of key workers. The unions' umbrella body said bonuses in finance and the insurance sector have reached a record £20,000 a year on average – which it says is almost one-and-a-half times the average pay collected by teaching assistants. – Guardian

Netflix will launch a cheaper subscription in the UK costing £4.99 per month from November as the streaming giant battles a jump in customer cancellations. The new "Basic with Adverts" subscription plan will launch on 3 November at 4pm in nine countries including the UK. – Telegraph

The sharp rise in borrowing costs since Kwasi Kwarteng's "mini-budget" means that most of Britain's warehouses, offices and shopping centres will lose as much as a fifth of their value over the coming two years. The warning came from Goldman Sachs, whose team of analysts sounded the alarm over the outlook for UK commercial properties, values of which they expect will be 15% or 20% below where they were this summer, come the end of 2024. The US investment bank's gloomy outlook will add to fears that commercial properties in the UK are on the brink of another sharp fall. – The Times

Yorkshire Water has become the latest regional monopoly supplier to be forced by the industry regulator into a £1.0bn bailout by its shareholders. After a year investigating the weak "financial resilience" of the lossmaking utility, which supplies 2.3m homes in parts of Derbyshire and Lincolnshire as well as Yorkshire, Ofwat has called on its foreign investors to pump in £940.0m to pay down loans and demanded they stump up £100.0m to tackle the company's poor record on sewer foul-flooding and river and beach pollution. – The Times

US close

US stocks closed well above the waterline on Thursday after a major turnaround, with the Dow rising more than 800 points despite a hotter-than-expected inflation reading from the Labor Department.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 2.83% at 30,038.72, while the S&P 500 added 2.6% to 3,669.91 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 2.23% firmer at 10,649.15.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com