Closing summary
Time to wrap up…
The energy regulator for Britain, Ofgem, has said it will increase the cap on energy bills from October by 2%, the equivalent of a £35 rise in annual bills for the average home, despite a 2% fall in the wholesale price in the energy markets over the last three months. Prices for households will go up just as the colder weather sets in because money is needed to cover the rising cost of the government’s energy policies.
About £15 of the £35 increase will fund an expansion of the warm home discount scheme to provide an extra 2.7 million households with a £150 reduction in their bills.
Thames Water has agreed a payment plan for £123m sewage and dividend fines, as it races to secure funding to avoid temporary government nationalisation.
Earlier this month the government approved the appointment of insolvency advisers to consult on plans for Thames Water to be placed into a special administration regime (SAR).
The debt-laden utility firm was hit with a record £104m fine by Ofwat in May over environmental breaches involving sewage spills, after failing to operate and manage its treatment works and wastewater networks effectively.
At the same time, a further £18.2m fine was levied on Thames for breaking dividend rules, the first penalty of its kind in the water industry.
The penalties were originally due to be paid by 20 August but the regulator gave the company some breathing space to pay the fines. Ofwat has now approved Thames’s request for a payment plan, which will result in it paying £24.5m, or 20% of the penalties, by the end of September, with the rest to be paid later.
Lego builds record sales of £4bn as parents steer children away from smartphones. The Danish toy company said sales increased by 12% to a record 34.6bn Danish kroner (£4bn) in the first half of the year, rising well ahead of the recovering global toy market in which sales rose 7%.
Niels B. Christiansen, chief executive, said Lego could be profiting from parents’ desire to keep children away from phones because of the effect of social media on mental health.
Over in the US, the highlight of the day will be when the chip designer Nvidia reports its quarterly earnings after the market close, or around 9pm BST.
Wall Street has opened flat today, with the S&P 500 share index down by 0.06% at the open. The Nasdaq index is also down slightly by 0.08%.
All eyes will be on chip designer Nvidia today when it reports after the US market closes.
Victoria Scholar, of the investment broker Interactive Investor, says:
Nvidia gets set to release its second quarter results after the bell as the final US tech giant to report this season.
There’s a lot of focus on this earnings report given that it comes off the back of a shaky period for tech stocks. The AI darlings like Nvidia, Palantir and Meta have suffered some selling pressure as investors start to question whether the winning streak is running out of steam. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI suggested a bubble could be forming in AI stocks and a report from MIT said 95% of organisations are getting zero return on generative AI investments.
However this comes after a strong bull run off the April lows for Nvidia which rebounded to become the first public company to achieve a market cap of $4 trillion in July.
…According to Refinitiv, Nvidia is expected to report Q2 earnings per share of $1 on revenues of $46 billion, up from 96 cents and $44.06 billion respectively in the previous quarter.
There will be a lot riding on guidance for the rest of the year with investors looking for reassurances that Nvidia can continue to deliver growth. China will be another focal point following the resumption of its AI chip sales there after Nvidia agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues. Last quarter, Nvidia said it lost out on $2.5 billion because of China export restrictions.
Investors will also be paying close attention to its Blackwell business which made up 70% of Nvidia’s data centre sales last quarter.
