Well, at least it wasn’t a profit warning. After the negative updates recently from Senior and Cobham, a degree of nervousness about GKN’s figures for the first nine months was understandable. This is another of those cases where the strength of sterling has sent headline profits up even as the end markets have got tougher.
The market was inclined to take a negative view. Sales for the first nine months were up by 21 per cent at £6.8 billion but the purchase a year ago of Fokker of the Netherlands chipped in £587 million and a currency benefit of £474 million. The rate of organic revenue growth was 2 per cent.
That is not bad, though. Margins fell but for perfectly understandable reasons, such