A round-up of today's business news in brief

Bank of England leaves rate at 0.5%

The Bank of England surprised markets by keeping its quantitative easing programme unchanged at £125 billion and the cost of borrowing unchanged at 0.5 per cent for the fourth month in a row. The move has boosted speculation that it may soon finish its unprecedented asset-buying scheme.

Analysts said the central bank tended to make most big decisions in months when it published new quarterly economic forecasts, so it may still choose next month to add to the quantitative easing scheme.

“This could be a pause or it could represent a halt for the Bank of England’s gilt purchases, said Stephen Lewis, economist at Monument Securities.

E-net wins second broadband deal

E-net, the company contracted to run the Government's metropolitan area networks, has won a second contract, bringing the number of towns in which it is managing the service to 93.
Under the second-phase contract, E-net will manage the networks in an additional 66 towns, 10 of which are already active. These include Tralee, Killarney, Navan, Longford and Bundoran.

The remaining towns will have their networks activated over the next 12 months.

The networks are high-speed fibre-optic rings built around towns to provide broadband internet services.

E-net was awarded the phase one contract in 2004 for a 15-year period and it earns revenues as part of its wholesaling of capacity to private operators.

Service providers such as Vodafone use these networks to provide services to customers. Vodafone recently signed a €17million, 15-year deal to access the network.

US wholesale inventories shrink

US wholesale inventories have shrunk for the ninth month in a row in May to $402.24 billion, their lowest level since August 2007. The 0.8 per cent drop was smaller than the 1 per cent decline some analysts had expected.

Sales at merchant wholesalers rose 0.2 per cent, beating expectations that they would be unchanged and pushing the inventory-to-sales ratio, a measure of how long it would take to deplete current stocks, down to 1.29 months.

That was the lowest since a matching ratio in November. – (Reuters)

TVC says its UTV holding 'long-term'

TVC Holdings executive chairman Shane Reihill said the company sees its shareholding in UTV Media as a "long-term" holding.

The company is always actively looking for new investments, though nothing is imminent, he told the company’s annual meeting in Dublin yesterday. – (Bloomberg)