Somehow Locog forgot to mention it. That, on the eve of the big event, it had booked corporate Britain to put on a bit of a show.
Why, just about everywhere you looked on Thursday, another chief executive came pole-vaulting by - gagging to get the results out of the way before settling down to all that promised Olympian hospitality, washed down with two-week hols.
Remarkably, 11 FTSE-100 companies decided Thursday was just the moment to unveil their figures, 12 if you include a trading update from Compass. And, while Danny Boyle it wasn’t, one thing stuck out: UK plc is nowhere near as knackered as you might think, whatever the impression given by Wednesday’s grim GDP numbers.
Indeed, understanding the divergence between the ONS’s economic stats and the race-fit figures presented by Britain’s biggest companies could be an Olympic sport in itself. Sure, the blue-chip index is a lousy barometer of economic Britain, with its constituents having an average 80pc of their business overseas. But they still create jobs and pay tax here, while averages don’t tell the full story.
BSkyB is pretty exclusively UK-focused. It’s just posted record pre-tax profits of £1.19bn, jacked up the dividend by 9pc and is generating enough cash for another £500m share buyback – all off the back of 312,000 more customers, taking the total to 10.6m. Even in these cash-strapped times, churn is only 9.9pc, beating analysts forecasts.
There’s a brighter picture too at that UK recovery story ITV, where chief executive Adam Crozier popped up with a 15pc rise in adjusted profits, a doubling of the dividend (from an admittedly low base) and news that the company now had £92m net cash versus £612m debt at the end of 2009.
It’s not just media companies, either. Rolls-Royce, which turned in a 7pc increase in underlying half-year profits to £637m and raised the dividend by 10pc, has most of its advanced manufacturing here, the only place it makes jet engines. Indeed, Rolls employs 22,000 people in Britain, with a new factory planed in Rotherham – the sort of initiative the Telegraph will be highlighting from Friday as it rounds up the positives from the business world under the slogan Good News Britain (Send us your company’s latest good news stories by email at: goodnewsbritain@telegraph.co.uk).
British Gas-owner Centrica may get brickbats for its charges to consumers but it is investing the profits in securer gas supplies – and does provide a bit of a natural hedge. Invest in it and you’d be in line for an 8pc rise in the half-year divvy. Not only does the 5pc yield beat the bank, the shares have lately been on the up, too. Another UK blue-chip, Unilever, can do better still. Its shares hit an all-time high on Thursday.
None of this, of course, signals that all is well with the world. The eurozone is imploding, British consumers continue to suffer the worse squeeze on real wages in living memory and, unlike multinationals, smaller companies are still getting gouged by the banks. Indeed, you could argue that even the optimism shown outside the FTSE – say, Travis Perkins’ 23pc dividend rise or the 33pc increase at wealth manager St James’s Place – proves that having cut costs and fixed their balance sheets, the best idea companies have got is to return cash to shareholders.
But at least they are in shape to do that. What they now need is a signal from David Cameron’s unimaginative Government to make them invest some of that cash – tax breaks, say, for infrastructure spending or a real attack on red tape. Using Tolley’s Tax Guide to light the Olympic flame would be a welcome start.
There’s a brighter picture too at that UK recovery story ITV, where chief executive Adam Crozier popped up with a 15pc rise in adjusted profits, a doubling of the dividend (from an admittedly low base) and news that the company now had £92m net cash versus £612m debt at the end of 2009.
It’s not just media companies, either. Rolls-Royce, which turned in a 7pc increase in underlying half-year profits to £637m and raised the dividend by 10pc, has most of its advanced manufacturing here, the only place it makes jet engines. Indeed, Rolls employs 22,000 people in Britain, with a new factory planed in Rotherham – the sort of initiative the Telegraph will be highlighting from Friday as it rounds up the positives from the business world under the slogan Good News Britain (Send us your company’s latest good news stories by email at: goodnewsbritain@telegraph.co.uk).
British Gas-owner Centrica may get brickbats for its charges to consumers but it is investing the profits in securer gas supplies – and does provide a bit of a natural hedge. Invest in it and you’d be in line for an 8pc rise in the half-year divvy. Not only does the 5pc yield beat the bank, the shares have lately been on the up, too. Another UK blue-chip, Unilever, can do better still. Its shares hit an all-time high on Thursday.
None of this, of course, signals that all is well with the world. The eurozone is imploding, British consumers continue to suffer the worse squeeze on real wages in living memory and, unlike multinationals, smaller companies are still getting gouged by the banks. Indeed, you could argue that even the optimism shown outside the FTSE – say, Travis Perkins’ 23pc dividend rise or the 33pc increase at wealth manager St James’s Place – proves that having cut costs and fixed their balance sheets, the best idea companies have got is to return cash to shareholders.
But at least they are in shape to do that. What they now need is a signal from David Cameron’s unimaginative Government to make them invest some of that cash – tax breaks, say, for infrastructure spending or a real attack on red tape. Using Tolley’s Tax Guide to light the Olympic flame would be a welcome start.
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