At last a bit of good news. Consumer goods group Reckitt Benckiser has just turned in an impressive set of first quarter results - operating profits up 13% - and shares in the Cillit Bang maker have jumped 3% to £28.66.
Elsewhere, the mood is still grim, with no sign of recovery among housebuilders, banks or miners. Poor UK retail sales and a gloomy CBI industrial trends survey have not helped sentiment, so the FTSE 100 is now 16.2 points lower at 5967.4.
Back to software group Autonomy for a moment. Evolution is taking an even more bearish tack after this morning's analyst meeting. "We have changed from reduce to sell and cut our target price from 825p to 700p," said the broker.
It said Autonomy was seeing growing competition from SaaS applications, web-based services where customers only pay for usage and do not own the software itself.
"The most important data out of today's analyst meeting was management news that customers are starting to look to SaaS for Autonomy solutions increasingly, and that this had a negative effect on the quarter (of a "few million dollars") in revenue terms. Management do not know how big this trend will be but the omens are bad; instead of upfront licence payments that drop directly through to the bottom line, which the Autonomy model is built on, monthly recurring revenue streams at far lower increments are signed instead.
"We do not understand why a US-focused software vendor with massive operational gearing, targeting an increase in earnings from $109m in 2007 to $189m in 2009, is rated so highly given organic licence growth is around 16% and the prospects are for a major US corporate downturn."
Autonomy is 107p lower at 882.5p.
