UK investors eye more results after record week

London's stock market may break new records next week amid more company results and take-over talk, and after the capital's leading shares index hit the best close for mmore than six years on Friday The FTSE 100 finished at 6,640.90 points on Friday, up 75.2 points or 1.14 percent from a week earlier. That marked the FTSE's highest finish since September 8, 2000.
Next week, clothes-to-food retailer Marks and Spencer and music publisher EMI are among top British companies who will publish their fiscal year results. Earlier this month, EMI said that it had received a number of take-over approaches, but did not name the interested parties. It could face a bid of about 3.0 billion pounds (4.4 billion euros, 5.9 billion dollars), according to analysts.
On Wednesday the group was expected to post a sharp fall in 2006-07 profits, weighed down by poor sales of new material from some of its key artists last Christmas.
Marks and Spencer was meanwhile expected to reveal a 28-percent increase in underlying pretax profit when it publishes full-year results on Tuesday. Some analysts are concerned that 2007-08 will be a much tougher year for the group as four interest rate rises in 10 months start to bite.
On Wednesday, "there will be substantial interest in the minutes of the May meeting of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, when interest rates were raised from 5.25 percent to 5.50 percent," Global Insight economist Howard Archer said.
The Bank of England this week forecast that British 12-month inflation would fall below its 2.0-percent target over the next year, but the outlook was uncertain further ahead.
The central bank's quarterly inflation report came after the bank had on May 10 raised its key interest rate by a quarter of a point to 5.50 percent, the highest level since 2001, to tackle rising costs. Next Friday, meanwhile, the British government publishes its second estimate of economic growth for the first quarter of 2007. Britain's economy expanded by 0.7 percent during the first three months of this year, initial data had shown.
It had also revealed that gross domestic product grew by 2.8 percent in the quarter to March 31, from the same quarter in 2006.