British telecoms group Cable & Wireless on Thursday scotched bid speculation surrounding the company as it beat forecasts with a 20 percent jump in annual core earnings and issued a confident outlook.
Persistent bid speculation has underpinned shares in Britain's number two corporate telecoms provider for months as a recovery in its laggard UK business gathers pace, making it one of the top performing telecoms stocks globally.
But the group, with a history that dates back to the 1860s when telegraph cables were first laid overseas from Britain, said most of the rumors were just market mischief-making.
"As far as we know, there's no one out there stalking us ... There is no imminent bid activity as far as we are concerned," Group Finance Director Tony Rice told reporters.
C&W also said there were no imminent plans for a formal demerger of the group, another topic of market speculation following its decision in January last year to split itself into separate UK and international business units with separate management teams.
However, C&W, which is in the midst of a radical overhaul in the UK which will cut UK 3,000 jobs over five years, said it had seen a "steady stream of gentle approaches" for some individual assets, but it was not interested in selling them.
The group said its recovery plan was progressing well and was ahead of schedule and unveiled core earnings forecasts for next year at the top end of market forecasts.
"We now have sufficient visibility to believe that we'll deliver on our ambitious targets," Chairman Richard Lapthorne said in a statement.

Microsoft-Yahoo: so what’s new?
At first glance, there’s not much new about today’s report in the New York Post that Microsoft (MSFT) has formally re-approached Yahoo (YHOO) about a merger. The article reads like banker talk: Investment bankers on one side or the other (or, better, a banker who couldn’t get a seat at the table) chatting up a deal to get things moving. It’s also not new news. A desperation merger between the two weaker online advertising players has been in the rumor mill for more than a year. Tim Arango and I speculated on such a move (among others) last October, for example, and UBS analyst Ben Schacter has justified a bullish call on Yahoo’s stock for quite a while predicated on Microsoft buying Yahoo if it got too cheap.

Does a deal make sense? Absolutely. Yahoo effectively could become MSN on steroids. The two search-advertising also-rans finally would be able to push serious traffic through their ad-search delivery platforms. Microsoft would bring major financial resources to Yahoo, which because of its underperformance in search has been cost-cutting elsewhere. (An Internet business cost-cutting during an advertising boom is a sad thing to see.) A tie-up also might explain why Yahoo CEO Terry Semel is still around. Everyone assumed he’d be gone by now. But Semel is a dealmaker, and this is an enormous deal.

Having said that, every time I’ve discussed a Microsoft-Yahoo merger with people who know the two companies well, they remark on what a disaster it would be. Those ad-search platforms, for example: each company has spent a fortune developing their own. It’d be a bitter pill to ditch one. Microsoft remains light years behind in truly understanding the Internet, at least compared with Google’s mastery. Google (GOOG) would love this deal, at least for a couple years, in the same way Dell (DELL) was ecstatic when HP (HPQ) bought Compaq. (Dell squandered an opportunity by not taking that deal seriously enough, but I digress.)

The market, of course, takes this report extremely seriously. Investors don’t care if a banker is trying to pump up a deal or if this talk is old or new. Yahoo’s stock was up 19% by late morning. Like the response to News Corp.’s (NWS) bid for Dow Jones (DJ) , the market’s reaction might make this deal a reality.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is spending £483,000 over five years on an online content management system, search engine and support services.

NICE is responsible for providing guidance on the prevention and treatment of ill health. Its website, www.nice.org.uk, serves to inform members of the public and healthcare professionals through interactive consultations and searchable databases.

The new content management system is intended to help NICE manage this information more efficiently.

Under the five-year deal System Associates will install its own bespoke content management system which the company says has been created specifically for the public sector.

NICE eMedia associate director Heidi Livingstone said in a statement: "We liked the fact that System Associates' technology already had compliance and standardised metadata built in. This, combined with a very user-friendly web-based interface, should allow us to manage content more effectively and provide enhanced web services to site visitors."