【BEC中級真題聽力】第二輯Test 2 - Part 3

Hello. I'm Jane Bowen with our regular Friday look at the week just finished on the London stock market. The general picture is pretty mixed. Shares in the major banks are trading down, while mining companies have surprised analysts with a small rise. Overall, it's been a week of considerable movement, with the highest level reached at the close two days ago and a sharp fall yesterday. A strong recovery saw most of those losses being made up today, but the closing figure still fell short of Wednesday's. Now here's Charles Wrighton with some company news. Thanks Jane. And first, clothing retailer, Brownlow. Having finally found a buyer for their loss, making sports footwear subsidiary, Hi-form, they've rejected a take-over bid from a leading French retail chain which has been looking to buy into the British market for some time. This activity has moved Brownlow's shares up by 20% to 96 pence. There's a lot of interest in the Lek energy group, which recently bought Westwales Electricity. To the relief of Westwales managers, Lek haven't brought in their own people to run the company. Despite predicted job cuts of something like a third of the engineering staff, no announcement has been made, and indeed, Lek's comprehensive training scheme has been opened to all grades of staff in Westwales. Back to you, Jane. We've had a number of emails from investors asking what to do with their shares in gas and electricity companies after their consistently poor performance recently. Many of you might be thinking of getting rid of yours as quickly as possible. But financial experts are fairly optimistic about the outlook for the power sector, and investors may do better to see what happens over the next few months. With so many other investors deciding to cut their losses and sell now, interest in this sector may increase, and that, of course, would push share prices up. Pharmaceutical companies have done well today. Recently we've seen several periods of rapid expansion in this sector, only for it to be overtaken a short time later by the strong financial institutions. But I actually think the recent performances of pharmaceuticals companies has hidden a steep drop in the share prices of many other companies. All other sectors have lost considerable amounts, but this simply has not been reflected in the overall value of the market, because pharmaceuticals companies are keeping the value high. Looking next at the sectors whose troubles have been in the news recently: supermarkets, having suffered a downturn in business for over a year, at last have some reason for optimism. The leisure industry, which has suffered even more than supermarkets, is also showing signs of a turnaround. The same cannot be said of the building sector, though, which expects little relief for at least another six months. Charles. One company in the news is Freewaves, which owns a chain in internet cafés. Like other new companies, Freewaves has tended to pay low dividends to investors, preferring to reinvest profits in research and development. Although Freewaves was able to turn in a healthy profit in the first quarter, taking everyone by surprise, the company has now declared operating losses close to a million pounds. This, of course, will make shareholders think about whether to keep their shares. And news from Simpson's, the big retail group. For years Simpson's have been acquiring other chains, giving them a strong market position, and they now sell everything from make-up to computers. But today Simpson's announced that they are to consolidate their three home improvement chains into one, under the Fresca name. Now for the figures.