Pre-tax profits are predicted to rise from around £521m to £610m.Over at Wm Morrison, and a sigh of relief is likely to be the biggest news. While most of this week’s attention is going to be on a Scotsman bearing a red brief- case, it does not mean the Budget is the only show in town.
The corporate news flow eases off compared to recent weeks, but just enough heavyweights are reporting, including retailers Kingfisher and Wm Morrison, to keep the City occupied.Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q, cheered the City last month when its fourth-quarter trading statement showed a robust end to the year, a particularly impressive performance seeing that the festive season is traditionally one of the DIY sector’s weakest. This is at least indicative of more open-mindedness and greater adaptability – the sort of attributes that should prevent businesses falling foul of certain events, such as Christmas.. For the whole year, underlying sales were up 5.1 per cent, which beat market expectations.Yet despite this good news, the shares have come off highs in recent weeks as fears of a consumer slowdown weigh on the stock. The point is that, particularly at times like these, when signs of recovery are so often followed by downturns or periods of uncertainty, young businesses need to keep a tight rein on costs and income.

And that is true even – or perhaps especially – when the going looks good.Another lesson is the importance of keeping separate personal and business interests. Insolvency specialists frequently come across cases where business founders have sought to stave off problems by putting in their own money. This is a natural temptation for entrepreneurs, who typically have such positive outlooks that they downplay any setbacks and play up the prospects of new orders and the like, convincing themselves that they will soon be paid back. Then the business has a period of about two weeks in which effectively no work is done – with a predictable effect on a cashflow already depleted by festive spending. What is an insoluble problem to them is an everyday thing to us,” reassures Smillie. And lest anybody should think that he and his ilk are over-anxious to profit from this potential misery, he stresses that an initial consultation with an insolvency specialist should not cost anything.The sorts of solutions that insolvency practitioners can come up with are too complex to go into in any detail here.

“In January, the average trading company [not including retailers] has its lowest level of debtors for the year,” explains Smillie, adding that this is when similarly cash-strapped creditors are “screaming for payment”. If they do not get paid, they tend to take court action in February or March.Though this will often have the dire consequences already mentioned, it is important that company directors realise that all is not necessarily lost – provided they talk to an expert “They still see us as undertakers But the truth is that there is still so much they can do. Nevertheless, March is traditionally a busy month for insolvency specialists – for the simple reason that this is when the Christmas Hangover takes effect.Mark Smillie, a partner with the London-based insolvency practice Middleton Partners, spells out the typical chain of events that can quickly convert an apparently successful business into another casualty.The company enjoys good October/November sales figures and then spends the money – on a Christmas party, bonuses, new cars and other trappings. What with a steady stream of cheerier economic news and a feeling that – for many of us, at least – winter came and went with last month’s cold snap, it would be easy to run away with the idea that the good times are here again. It would not be too surprising if Mr Brown’s by now familiar pronouncements about enterprise are accompanied by the closures up and down the country of just the sorts of businesses the Government professes to be encouraging.True, businesses open and close all the time – the numbers setting up and packing in are about even most years – with the result that the total stock stays about the same. But with neither of the architects of the original deal – ex-Lloyds TSB boss Peter Ellwood and former Widows chief Mike Ross – still at the bank, a similar offer made today would be rather tempting.j.nisse independent.co.uk. The dead weight of the Widow, and the worries that its capital needs will swallow part of Lloyds TSB’s dividend, has held back the bank’s shares and given it less freedom to pursue the group’s traditional activity of buying rivals and squeezing the pennies out of them.