Spain Business
Spain Business Brief - Tuesday April 29 2008
By h.b. - Apr 29, 2008 - 1:12 PM
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The advance number for harmonised inflation in April has been released this morning by the INE, the Spanish National Statistics Institute. It shows a fall of 0.4% over the month to take the annual rate of the IPCA to 4.2%, its lowest for five months. Between December 2007 and March this year the rate has moved between 4.3% and 4.6%.
It’s the first reduction in seven months but remains 1.7% higher than the rate a year ago in the index which is harmonised with other European countries. The high inflation remains caused by petrol and food price increases.
Meanwhile small shopkeeper sales have fallen by 8.7% in March compared to a year ago, according to the INE, which also revealed a 1.2% growth in employment in the small shopkeeper sector.
Sales of foodstuffs in the sector was down 5.1%.
Top Partido Popular activist, Eduardo Zaplana, the man who was the party’s spokesman in Congress last legislature, is to resign from his seat to become the European representative for Telefónica. He had announced that he would no longer be party spokesman last March.
A statement from Telefónica says that Zaplana joins them at a time of the consolidation for the company in Europe, ‘after the acquisition of O2 and the old Cesky Telecom, and the purchase of 10% of the voting shares in Telecom Italia.
Banco Santander has announced a 22% increase in profits for the first quarter of the year, at 2.206 billion €. The bank, chaired by Emilio Botín, has noted that this is the largest profit in a single quarter ever obtained by the bank in its history. The bank saw income increase by 19%.
The other side of the news was that bad debt was up to 1.16%.
It comes as Deutsche Bank announced their first loss for five years.
Spanair, which is currently up for sale, has announced losses of 41 million € for the first quarter of the year. It’s a similar number to that posted for the same quarter last year. Parent company SAS has seen its losses increase 24 fold to reach 121 million.
Another four construction related companies in Spain have announced application for bankruptcy protection as the economic crisis continues to bite. They are the transport company, ‘Casalux Patrimonio’, constructor ‘Armenar 2000’ and the companies 'Acoplan Ingeniería, Proyectos y Obras' and 'Hierros y materiales de construcción Mancheno'.
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