The week ahead...

The week gets off to a start with preliminary results from Telecity (TCY).

Jonathan Imlah, analyst at Collins Stewart, estimates that revenues will grow by 19% to £233.7 million for the full-year. The corresponding figure for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) was £103.8 million, which represents a growth of 24%.

"Telecity remains a core sector holding in our view given its combination of exposure to areas of strong secular growth such cloud computing and mobile internet, high recurring revenue and excellent cash generation. Management's commitment at its third-quarter interim management statement in November to pay a maiden dividend starting in the second half of 2012 should also tick a box for yield fans," Imlah stated.

However, he pointed out that the company faced currency headwinds. About 50% of group revenues come from the eurozone and with the euro falling 7% against sterling in the last six months, the company is unlikely to see any earning upgrades.

Shares in the company have soared 45% over the past six months and are currently trading at a 2012 EV/EBITDA ratio of over 11 times. This represents a premium of between 15% and 30% to its closest peers. Imlah thus had a 'hold' recommendation on the stock.

Brainspark (BSP) will issue a trading update on the same day.

Last week, shares in the company surged over 40% as chief executive Alfredo Villa asked if the £160,700 owed to him could be given to him as 1,004,375 new Brainspark ordinary shares at a price of 16p per share. If the board agrees to this proposal, Villa will have personally injected £500,000 in return for 3,125,000 new Brainspark shares.

Additionally, ahead of a court hearing on Monday, the company filed a witness declaration stating that all the creditors who had requested settlement had been paid and that the company had reduced its debt by 40% in 2011 from £10,781,000 to £6,488,000. The debt position now represents less than 25% of the company's assets.

InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) will report its 2011 results on Tuesday.

Consensus forecasts are for $1.76 billion (1.12 billion) in revenues and $544 million in earnings before interest and tax (EBIT).

Simon French, analyst at Panmure Gordon, was very optimistic. "Weekly RevPar [revenue per available room] data from the US has been very encouraging and we expect the group to report an upbeat start to 2012," he said.

Additionally, he predicted that the strength of the US hotel market will result in the company disposing off the InterContinental NY Barclay in 2012. "This sale could lead to a $250 million cash return to shareholders, which would increase earnings per share by between 2% and 3%," he commented.

The stock trades on a 2012 price to earnings ratio of between 17 and 18 times.

"Whilst not inexpensive the group's US exposure, potential for forecast upgrades and additional cash returns to shareholders leave it well positioned to outperform," French stressed, reiterating his 'buy' recommendation.

Midweek will see Domino's Pizza (DOM) serve its preliminary results.

A post-close trading update on 4 January demonstrated a 3% increase in like-for-like sales growth. However, net store openings were marginally behind expectations with 55 in the UK & Ireland and four in Germany.

"Domino's is a volume-driven business where the combination of new openings and volume-driven like-for-like sales growth are the key drivers," noted Collins Stewart analyst Wayne Brown. "It is the latter that will be difficult to achieve in 2012, but the former that could provide greater momentum," he added.

However, he reminded investors that the consumer backdrop was weak and whilst Domino's had been investing in new products and extending hours into lunch and late night, volume growth was going to be harder to achieve.

Brown also admitted that at a 2012 price to earnings ratio of almost 23 times, Domino's was not cheap.

However, he had a 'buy' recommendation on the stock. His positive stance is predicated on Domino's delivering a strategy that would drive the adequate volume growth to support upgrades including increasing its store roll-out and utilising its strong cash flows to acquire smaller operators in Germany.

The retail sector will come back in focus once again as Sports Direct International (SDI) issues its interim management statement on the same day.

Philip Dorgan, analyst at Panmure Gordon, expects the statement to be "decent". "We expect to see similar top-line growth to that achieved in the first half, despite tough comparables," he stated. The company posted an 8.2% increase in sales, on a space increase of 2.6%.

Shares in the clothing retailer are trading on a 2013 price to earnings ratio of about 11 times - a level which fails to take account of Sports Direct's online opportunity, especially in Europe, according to Dorgan.

"As the shares trade closer to our target price of 300p (a huge psychological barrier, as this was the initial public offering price), then it is highly likely that Mike Ashley will sell down his 73% shareholding, we think, closer to 52%," Dorgan noted. However, he stressed that this was a "good" thing as it would increase liquidity in the shares.

He rated the stock a 'buy'.

The attention to the retail space will continue as Kingfisher (KGF) publishes its results on Thursday.

The world's third-largest home improvement group has copied the banks and "stress-tested" its business, drawing up contingency plans for nightmare scenarios in the eurozone, from which it obtains about half of its revenues.

And is the clock ticking on Anglo American's (AAL) independence? Analysts seem to think so, especially after $90 billion marriage between Xstrata (XTA) and Glencore International (GLEN).

Investors will be keen to find out what the iron ore producer's plans are as it releases a statement at the end of the week.

The economic platform for next week is just as busy as the corporate news.

The January housing market survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), out overnight Monday/Tuesday, will indicate whether or not slightly improved housing market activity at the end of 2011 extended into the start of 2012.

"While there has hardly been a major step up in housing market activity and it remains very weak compared to long-term norms, there was nevertheless a modest pick-up in mortgage approvals and levels of sales transactions late in 2011," pointed out Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight.

He expects the RICS survey to reveal that the balance of surveyors reporting that house prices rose over the previous three months edged back to -18% in January after rising to -16% in December from -17% in November and -24% in October.

Tuesday sees the publication of January's consumer price inflation (CPI) data.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has already reported that overall annual shop price inflation moderated to a 22-month low of 1.4% in January from 1.7% in December.

While Philip Shaw, economist at Investec assumes that the CPI will fall to a 14-month low of 3.4% in January after dipping to 4.2% in December, Archer predicts that the figure will be 3.6%.

"Inflation is expected to have fallen appreciably further in January as a result of much of the impact of the January 2011 VAT increase from 17.5% to 20.0% dropping out," Archer said. "In addition, the year-on-year increase in oil, commodity and many food prices is likely to have eased as they were rising appreciably in late-2010/early-2011."

However, Archer also pointed out that January's drop in the CPI rate may have been limited by many retailers starting to discount earlier in the December 2011/January 2012 clearance sales than they did in the December 2010/January 2011 sales.

A raft of data is out midweek, including January's unemployment figures, December's average earnings and Bank Of England's quarterly inflation report for February.

Over the past three months, claimant count unemployment data has recorded a relatively stable number of Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) claimants. However, the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) measure of the jobless total reached a new 17-year high, rising to 2.68 million in the quarter to November 2011.

While the stabilisation in the JSA data provides some hope that the recent deterioration in the ILO measure might start to level out, Investec economist Victoria Cadman believes that the weakness of the UK economy, along with the continued shrinkage of the public sector headcount, threatens to push up the jobless total in the months ahead.

She thus expects the ILO unemployment to stand at 83,000, with December's pay growth coming in at 1.8%.

Archer predicted the ILO figure to be 85,000 to reach a 17-year high of 2.707 million, resulting in an ILO unemployment rate of 8.5%. With regards to December's pay growth, he expects the figure to be 1.9%.

However, he reminded investors that the earnings growth rate of 1.8% was substantially below the 4.5% level that was generally considered consistent with the Bank of England's 2% consumer price inflation target. "They are also well below current inflation levels, so consumers' purchasing power is still being substantially squeezed even though consumer price inflation is now retreating," he added.

The Bank of England's quarterly inflation report for February will offer important clues as to how monetary policy is likely to develop over the coming months following the decision of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to enact a further £50 billion of Quantitative Easing at their February meeting.

Archer suspects that the inflation report will leave the door open to further quantitative easing and also indicate that interest rates are likely to remain at the current level of 0.5% for some considerable time to come.

Retail sales volume data will be out at the end of the week.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) measure of retail sales volumes rose by 0.7% on the month in December. Moreover, the series has exhibited a degree of unexpected buoyancy over the past three months, with sales volumes increasing by 1.1%, their fastest pace since August 2010.

Evidence from surveys for January has been mixed: While the John Lewis weekly numbers have been very robust, the CBI distributive trades survey disappointed and the British Retail Consortium (BRC) sales monitor showed a decent 2.1% annual sales value growth.

"In the absence of a uniform steer from the various anecdotal pointers, we are left pondering whether the recent run of buoyant numbers is likely to be maintained," voiced Shaw. "We take the view that this is unlikely and accordingly we are looking for 0.4% decline in sales on the month."

Archer is also expecting a decline, albeit a smaller one at 0.3%, stressing that it is hard to be optimistic over the prospects for consumer spending in the early months of 2012 "at least".

"Consumers' confidence is still very low despite picking up in January, while their purchasing power is still under severe pressure from relatively high inflation, muted wage growth and tight fiscal policy," he commented. "Meanwhile, unemployment is rising markedly and the jobs outlook currently looks pretty bleak at the moment. On top of this, debt levels are high and there is a need for, and desire of, many consumers to improve their finances, which is limiting their willingness to spend," he added.

And last but not least, Nationwide will publish its January consumer confidence data.

UK consumer confidence continued to languish close to record lows in December with Nationwide's survey dropping to 38 from 40 in November, just two points clear of October's record low of 36.

Cadman predicts that the index will be pushed up by five points to 43 in January, driven by better sentiment on the euro crisis and a narrowing gap between earnings growth and inflation.

However, Cadman reminded that the reading would still be "some way off" the survey's long-run average of 77, with consumers remaining nervous about the weak UK economic outlook.

Monday 13 February

Trading updates

Brainspark, Telecity, Kofax, Amino Technologies, Monitise, Fidessa Group

AGM/EGM/Special Meetings

Stobart, RWS Holdings

Tuesday 14 February

Trading updates

Intercontinental Hotels Group, Hargreaves Sciences, Yell group, Pennon Group, Brammer, Willis Group Holdings

AGM/EGM/Special Meetings

Nasstar

Wednesday 15 February

Trading update

Dominos, Sports Direct International, Town Centre Securities, Exillon Energy. Morgan Crucible, Speedy Hire, Katanga Mining

AGM/EGM/Special Meetings

Shanta Gold, F&C Capital

Thursday 16 February

Trading update

Alumasc, Halma, Alumasc Group, African Barrick Gold, BAE Systems, Kingfisher, Ladbrokes, Reed Elsevier, Cable and Wireless Worldwide

AGM/EGM/Special Meetings

Media, Baring Emerging Europe

Friday 17 February

Trading update

S and U, Anglo American

AGM/EGM/Special Meetings

Medicx, Capital Shopping Centres