It appears that a few companies have returned from their bucket and spade summer vacation with an appetite for a spending spree. Yesterday the massive US Kraft conglomerate made a £10bn bid for UK’s chocolate producer Cadbury’s and today a far more interesting alliance is announced today with T-mobile and Orange agreeing to merge from November.
The deal between Orange-owner France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK will create a business with sales of 9.4bn euros (£8.2bn; $13.5bn).The merged firm will have about 37% of the UK mobile market – overtaking the current leader, Telefonica’s O2.
How will this new market leader take on O2’s dominance of the hand-held internet market with it’s exclusivity with the Apple iphone? Both brands will remain separate for the first 18 months after the deal is completed while branding is reviewed. Interesting ideas on naming, possible Lancashire version T’orange, like T’internet? 
Taking a broad feel of the market reports in the past two weeks there is a fair amount of optimism out there. No we are not in a steep growth curve and if this is a recovery, versus a small bounce before 2nd fall, then any this growth continue to be small.
Since first drafting this blog entry yesterday there is a definite uplift in optimism with consultancy KPMG reporting the first rise in permanent job positions in 17 months and plenty of press, radio and TV coverage claiming the recession is over. One other news story yesterday predicting that interest rates will remain low with no expected change to the Bank of England base rate when they publish their decision tomorrow lunchtime.
So are we out of recession? Are the bad times over?
My take / predictions; for the past half a century the UK economy has gone through a boom and bust cycle every 10 years. This mini recession has been deep and any return to growth will be slow, with a possible slip early 2010. Interest rates look like they will remain low through 2010 with some very competitive mortgage deals with the smaller lenders (big banks will still be profit taking to pay back the UK government). Job market will probably be less stable until middle of the year (or two quarters of consecutive growth), however housing market in the south east will continue the late summer price gains with demand outstripping supply.
What do you think? What are your predictions for 2010?
