City Republic: Emap, Sainsbury's, Porsche and WSJ ambitions

Such guidance as there is from the company seems to be that there are no firm offers on the table to buy all or the various bits of the company.

Which is presumably a bit of a blow to chairman Alun Cathcart, who wants to sell the company. He now says he'll wait until early next year.

So maybe former managing director Sir David Arculus' management buy-in bid is still alive.

Sainsbury's shows up the Qataris
The bid by Delta Two, part of the Qatari Investment Authority for Sainsbury's always looked opportunistic in the extreme and the supermarket's half-year results announced today (Wednesday) bear this out.

Pre-tax profits in the six months to October 6 rose from £194m to £232m, with like-for-like sales (excluding fuel) up 4%.

So who needs Delta Two, or property dealer Robert Tchenguiz, who's still trying to persuade the board to flog off its property?

CEO Justin King said the board wasn't going to do that on the radio this morning (although he didn't sound 100% convincing).

Running one of the big supermarkets isn't actually the hardest job in the world, with all that free cash flow, buying power and instant market research.

Nothing seems likely to derail Sainsbury's in the medium term, so Delta Two and Tchenguiz (with 35% of the shares between them) are faced with hanging on for another bidder, coming back themselves (hardly likely, surely), or dribbling shares into the market.

The latter looks a good idea.

Wall Street regains (some of) its nerve
Wall Street has been distinctly twitchy recently, with every tremor in the finance sector sending shares nose-diving.

Yesterday, the mighty Wal-Mart steadied nerves by reporting third quarter profits up 8% on higher sales figures.

So the cost-conscious majority in America isn't on its uppers yet, even though lots of them are losing their houses.

There's lots more bad news to come out of the banking sector (in the UK, as well as the US) because of the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown.

But the Dow Jones gained three hundred points on Tuesday and the tech-heavy Nasdaq bounced back after profit taking over the weekend.

Far Eastern markets traded strongly this morning (Wednesday) in sympathy.

But it's a while since we had two good days on Wall Street, so the markets aren't out of the woods yet.

The London FTSE 100 has been pretty steady throughout all this (and opened higher this morning). Stiff upper lips, chaps.

Is it a Porsche or a hedge fund?
Luxury carmaker Porsche made €5.86bn profit in the year to June 30, a staggering figure that has allowed it, among other things, to acquire 31% of VW.

But, according to the Financial Times, it made €3.6bn from investments and just €1.05bn from making cars (the rest came from share revaluations and the like).

Surely it can't keep this up?

But it's still sitting on a controlling stake in Europe's biggest carmaker. Buy a Porsche, get a Golf free.

Is the oil bubble punctured?
The press in the UK is waking up to the fact that the rise in oil prices is being driven as much by speculators as it is demand from China and India. The excellent Chris Blackwell spelt this out in the London Evening Standard yesterday (Tuesday) following a good piece in The Sunday Times. Basically hedge funds, some of them employing clever mathematicians, take bets on oil (among other commodities), wade into the markets and the price goes up. These guys are effectively wagering $100m a day. The head of Opec spoke out against this recently, saying there was actually enough oil to keep everyone happy but the price reflected speculation just as much as supply and demand. So the oil price has weakened. Let's hope the hedgies catch a cold. Although some sap at a big clearing bank has probably been bankrolling their nefarious activities (which means we'll all suffer -- again).

Rupert embarks on his last hurrah?
Well it must be surely, the bloke is pushing 80.

Speaking in Adelaide, where News Corporation began all those years ago, Rupert Murdoch announced that The Wall Street Journal's website was going to be free sometime in the future (the WSJ's subscription model has previously been regarded as the online newspaper holy grail) and that News Corp was in rude financial health.

Essentially, all his bets are coming off. Even The Sun is still hovering above three million daily copies despite all the odds.

Rupert regards the financial community as a febrile lot, although he does front up when required and give straight answers to straight questions.

He'd like the WSJ to become the world's first truly international paper. And he may well succeed.

Stephen Foster is a former news editor of Campaign, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog www.editco.net and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.