HomeServe restarts telephone sales

HOMESERVE, the Walsall-based emergency maintenance and home cover group, has restarted its telephone sales activity after temporarily suspending the operation following claims of mis-selling. It said since the claims it had also increased the number of retrained staff taking inbound calls and this would be rolled out on a region by region basis. It is reviewing its direct mail marketing material ahead of the next mailings, which are currently scheduled for the new year. In relation to the complaints from last winter, the company has implemented a process to review all cases.  It will be re-contacting customers whose complaint was not appropriately dealt with. The group said it had taken 14,000 calls last week and few customers had opted to cancel policies.

Andrew Sykes declares dividend

HEATING and air conditioning group Andrew Sykes has announced an interim dividend of 6.6p per ordinary share of 1p each. The Wolverhampton-based group declared the dividend at its latest board meeting. There are currently 42,699,588 Ordinary Shares in issue and therefore the total dividend payable is £2,818,173. The interim dividend will be paid on December 1, 2011 to shareholders on the register on November 18, 2011 and the Ordinary Shares will become ex-dividend on November 16, 2011.

Cookson warns of tough second half

COOKSON, which owns the Foseco ceramics operations in Tamworth, said trading in its Ceramics and Electronics divisions had remained robust. It said during the period July 1 to November 9 conditions in its main end-markets of global steel and foundry castings production were as anticipated in the group’s half-year statement. In the relatively small solar power end-market it said there had been a significant fall in demand since mid-year. Electronics end-market conditions have been better than expected, while its Precious Metals division has experienced good trading conditions in Europe but a marked deterioration in US markets. As a result of these, the group said it now expected its overall performance in the second half of the year to be slightly below that of the first half.  However, this would still result in a full year performance substantially ahead of 2010.