This morning has shown us that the way that the UK government deals with the private-sector has issues. From Reuters.
Interserve Plc’s (L:IRV) shares sank almost 60 percent in value on Monday after the British outsourcing company announced a rescue plan that was likely to see a big part of its debt converted into new equity, potentially handing control of the company to its creditors.
Interserve, which employs 75,000 worldwide and has thousands of UK government contracts to clean hospitals and serve school meals, said on Sunday it would seek to cut its debt to 1.5 times core earnings in a plan it hopes to finalise early next year.
I am not sure that the next bit inspires much confidence either.
Interserve Chief Executive Debbie White reiterated that the company’s fundamentals were strong and that the debt reduction plan, first raised in a refinancing in April, had the support of 10 Downing Street.
This provokes echoes of this from January.
Carillion was liquidated after contract delays and a slump in business left it swamped by debt and pensions liabilities., triggering Britain’s biggest corporate failure in a decade and forced the government to step in to guarantee public services from school meals to road works.
If we switch to the Financial Times what could go wrong with this bit?
after moving into areas in which it had no expertise, including waste from energy plants and probation services.
It is hard not to feel that this particular company is yet another zombie that will be kept alive as another failure will be too embarrassing for the establishment. The share price is understandably volatile but at the time of typing had halved to a bit over 12 pence. This compares to the around £5 as we moved into 2016.
Also according to the FT there is something of a queue forming behind it.
The crisis at Interserve is the latest to hit Britain’s troubled outsourcing sector, with Kier, Capita and Mitie also seeking to rebuild their balance sheets. Kier, another construction and support services company, launched a £264m emergency rescue rights issue last month as it warned that lenders were seeking to cut their exposure to the sector. Kier, which employs 20,000 in the UK, emphasised that it needed the “proceeds on the group’s balance sheet by December 31 . . . in light of tighter credit markets”. It said its debt had increased from £186m in June to £624m at the end of October.
I do not know about you but debt trebling in a few months is something that is in financial terms terrifying.
Monthly GDP
This morning brought the latest in the UK’s monthly GDP reports and the opening salvo was better than what we have seen recently.
Monthly growth rose to 0.1% in October 2018, following flat growth in August and September 2018.
If we look into the detail we see that yet again this was driven by the service sector which on its own produced 0.2% growth in October. Here is some detail on this.
The professional, scientific and technical activities sector made the largest contribution to the month-on-month growth, contributing 0.11 percentage points.
However as it outperformed total GDP growth there had to be issues elsewhere and we find the main one in the production sector.
In October 2018, total production output fell by 0.6%, compared with September 2018, due to a fall of 0.9% in manufacturing; this was partially offset by a 1.8% increase in mining and quarrying.
Whether that number will prove to be a general standard I do not know but we do know production in Germany fell by 0.5% in October as we looked at that only on Friday. As for more detail there is this.
The monthly decrease in manufacturing output of 0.9% was due mainly to weakness from transport equipment, falling by 3.2% and pharmaceutical products, falling by 5.0%; 5 of the 13 manufacturing subsectors increased.
Anyone who has been following the news will not be surprised to see the transport sector lower as for example there was a move to a 3 day week for at least one of the Jaguar Land Rover factories. Regular readers will be aware that the pharmaceutical sector has regular highs and lows and recently June was a high and October a low as we wait for a more general pattern to emerge.
Maybe there was also some food for thought for Interserve and the like here.
Construction output decreased by 0.2% in October 2018
Quarterly GDP
The performance was more solid than you might have expected from the monthly data.
UK gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 0.4% in the three months to October 2018.
In case you were wondering how this happened? Here is the explanation.
While the three most recent monthly growths were broadly flat, the lower level in the base period gives a comparatively strong rolling three-month growth rate.
If we move forwards to the detail we see something that is rather familiar,
Rolling three-month growth in the services sector was 0.3% in October 2018, contributing 0.23 percentage points to GDP growth.
But this time around it was using the words of Andrew Gold much less of a lonely boy.
The production and construction sectors also had positive contributions, with rolling three-month growths of 0.3% and 1.2%, respectively.
If we start with the construction sector then this time around we start to wonder how some of the outsourcing companies we looked at above seemed to have done so badly at a time of apparent boom? Moving on to production.
Rolling three-month growth in the production industries was 0.3%, while in manufacturing industries growth was flat. Production growth was driven by broad-based increases within the sector.
Peering into the transport sector we get a rather chilling reminder of the past.
Three-months on a year ago growth for manufacture of transport equipment was negative 0.9%, the lowest growth rate since November 2009.
Returning to services we get a reminder that the transport sector can pop up here too.
with a softening in services sector growth mainly due to a fall in car sales.
On the other side of the coin there were these areas.
Accounting contributed 0.08 percentage points to headline GDP growth, while computer programming contributed 0.07 percentage points.
Comment
We see that considering the international outlook the data so far shows the UK to be doing relatively well. An example of a comparison was the Bank of France reducing its estimate for quarterly GDP growth to 0.2% this morning. Sticking with the official mantra we have slowed overall but saw a small rebound in October. So far so good.
Less reassuring is the simply woeful state of the outsourcing sector which looks a shambles. Also there was something troubling in the revisions and updates to the trade figures which included this.
Removing the effect of inflation, the total trade deficit widened £3.0 billion in the three months to October 2018.
So we did well to show any growth at all in October but there was more.
The total trade deficit widened £5.4 billion in the 12 months to October 2018 due mainly to a £5.1 billion narrowing in the trade in services surplus.
It is nice of our official statisticians to confirm my long-running theme that we have at best a patchy knowledge of what is going on in terms of services trade, but not in a good way in terms of direction. This especially impacted in the quarter just gone.
In Quarter 3 2018, the total trade balance was revised downwards by £6.9 billion, due mainly to exports, which were revised down £5.9 billion; imports were revised up by £1.0 billion.
The goods deficit was revised downwards by £3.1 billion in Quarter 3 2018 as exports of goods were revised downwards by £2.0 billion and imports revised upwards by £1.1 billion.
This would be a rather large factor pushing us from growth to contraction but for two factors. One may wash out to some extent in other parts of the national accounts.
A large component of the revision to trade in goods in the most recent quarter was revisions to unspecified goods (including non-monetary gold).
You would think that movements in gold would be easy to account for. Silly me! Also we now get into the geek section which is that trade is in the expenditure version of the national accounts and it is the output version which is officially assumed to be the correct one. So numbers which suggest the UK may have contracted in Q3 are likely to perhaps drag growth slightly lower to 0.5% or 0.4% on the grounds that you cannot ignore them entirely as we sing along to Genesis one more time.
Too many men, there’s too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can’t you see this is a land of confusion ?