London pre-open: Stocks seen muted after uninspiring Wall St session

(Sharecast News) - London stocks were set for a muted open on Tuesday following an uninspiring session on Wall Street. The FTSE 100 was called to open two points lower at 7,458.

Data out earlier showed that shop price inflation dropped to its lowest in 17 months in November, as retailers stepped up discounting ahead of the key festive shopping season.

The year-on-year growth in retail prices eased to 4.3% this month, down from 5.2% in October, according to the closely watched Shop Price Index put together by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Nielsen.

This was below the three-month average of 5.3% and the lowest rate of annual growth since June 2022.

Food inflation slowed to 7.8% from 8.8%, particularly for dairy products, due to lower domestic energy prices reducing overall input costs. Non-food inflation fell to 2.5% from 3.4%.

Over the month of November, prices were flat, slowing from the 0.3% month-on-month growth in October.

"Shop price inflation eased for the sixth month in a row as retailers competed fiercely to bring prices down for customers ahead of Christmas," said Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the BRC.

"Retailers are committed to delivering an affordable Christmas for their customers. They face new headwinds in 2024 - from government-imposed increases in business rates bills, to the hidden costs of complying with new regulations. Combining these with the biggest rise to the National Living Wage on record will likely stall or even reverse progress made thus far on bringing down inflation, particularly in food."

In corporate news, budget airline easyJet swung to a profit in its annual results after a record second-half financial performance as it delivered a positive outlook for the year ahead and reinstated its dividend.

The company, which hasn't paid a dividend to shareholders in three years, declared a final dividend of 4.5p per share, amounting to £34m and equal to 10% of after-tax headline profit.

As previously stated, the airline intends to increase this to 20% of profits in the current financial year.

EasyJet reported a headline pre-tax profit of £445m in the 12 months to 30 September, up from a loss of £178m the year before and in line with management's guidance of £440-460m.

IT infrastructure technology and services provider Softcat reported a robust first-quarter performance in a trading update, achieving double-digit gross profit growth driven by strong demand.

The company said its progress was in line with expectations, and the outlook it set at its full-year results.