It is bidding for the Italian tobacco monopoly and has an eye on possible spoils in the US. Both moves should help mitigate the negative earnings effect from the weakness of the US dollar and the competitive conditions in the US.BAT reported first-quarter pre-tax profits of £464m, compared with £463m in the first quarter of 2002 Operating profits fell from £523m to £515m. Its top four brands – Lucky Strike, Kent, Dunhill and Pall Mall – continued their strong run, with volumes up by 15 per cent.Analysts expect the lack of earnings momentum to hold the stock back over the next few months, but BAT’s long-term prospects are as healthy as anything linked to a cigarette company gets What’s more, the shares yield a tasty 7 per cent. Buy on any weakness.Time to retire McCarthy & Stone McCarthy & Stone is one of those companies which is definitely on the right side of Britain’s demographic time bomb. Its margins are a massive 40 per cent and it has plenty of land in the pipeline.Half-year profits reported yesterday were way ahead of market expectations, rising 80 per cent to £39.7m.

The number of unit sales rose 34 per cent to 831, with the average price up 19 per cent to £122,900.So why did the stock drift 8.5p lower to 366.5p yesterday? The answer is a combination of profit taking – the shares had been trading at a five-year high – and comments about prospects. While the results were clearly excellent, McCarthy & Stone said it anticipated some softening of the market. It said this was most apparent in the central London market, though the area within the M25 only accounts for 4 per cent of the group’s sales.This offers protection but with the perceived wisdom being that what happens in London first has a ripple effect on the rest of the country later, this looks a worrying trend. There was also a note about “build cost pressures” particularly in labour and increased regulation such as the aggregates tax and landfill duties Take profits.. Heard the one about the steel company that didn’t have enough money to pay for its own cost-cutting programme? The Corus line gets more desperate and more bizarre with every rendition but yesterday’s rather takes the biscuit. There is, it seems, enough money to fund the new executive bonus scheme, which handily no longer relies on the company making profits, but not enough to finance the latest 1,150 job cuts and extra capacity reductions. The latest down-sizing exercise will cost £250m, but in order to afford it Corus will have to sell off even more bits of the business.

The alternative is to raise new money from the equity markets which is a non-starter with Corus virtually reduced to the status of a penny stock, or from the banks, which looks equally challenging when the business is already groaning under £1.2bn of debt. Still, you have to hand it to Sir Brian Moffat, the outgoing chairman, for sheer audacity. Sticking two fingers up to the workforce in the very citadel of organised labour, was some swansong as he heads for his £300,000-a-year pension.The chairman was told he ought to be wearing sackcloth and ashes but turned up instead in a Saville Row suit while the new French chief executive, Philippe Varin, did not bother to make an appearance at all because technically he does not start to earn his £1.7m pay packet until tomorrow.Corus (website motto: The Future in Metal) has a past, but does it have a tomorrow? Since the ill-fated merger of British Steel and Hoogovens four years ago, Corus has been almost as big a corporate disaster as Marconi. Some 10,000 jobs have disappeared into the furnace, UK steel making capacity has been cut by more than a third and the share price has been shredded. A line was famously drawn in the sand when the company cut 6,000 jobs and ended steel making at its Llanwern integrated plant two years ago. The aim, supposedly, was to shrink capacity to fit the declining demand from an ever-smaller manufacturing base. Now the axe is back and this time the workforce in south Yorkshire is feeling the touch of cold steel.The bloodletting will almost certainly not end with Corus’s Sheffield engineering steels business for the blackspot has been attached to the North-east as well where the Teesside integrated plant will have to scrape a living by feeding slabs to the international market.

If history has taught Corus anything, it is that there are plenty of other countries out there with a fraction of the labour costs that can supply the commodity steel market. So Teesside looks as good as closed and along with it another 2,200 direct jobs.From five integrated sites at the time of privatisation employing 60,000 people and producing nearly 20 million tonnes of liquid steel, Corus will have more than halved in size.Whether it has the critical mass to survive at all is a moot point. If and when the new management team stop the haemorrhaging in the UK carbon steels business and succeed in refinancing the business, a sale of the rump to anybody who is interested looks like the next step.Maybe Britain no longer needs, or even deserves, a steel industry of its own. But when you consider that tiny Luxembourg manages to be the home of the world’s biggest steel maker, then you have to wonder how many of Corus’s wounds have been self-inflicted.Leeds UnitedThe plight of Leeds United is a stark reminder, if one were needed, that football fans should stick to watching the game rather than investing in it. When the club was in its pomp the supporters had a bizarre habit of standing bare chested in freezing temperatures simply chanting “Leeds, Leeds Leeds.” Now they risk losing their shirts in more ways than one because Leeds stands financially naked and on the edge of calling in the administrators. Drowning in £79m of debt and losing money at the operating level the corporate turnaround specialists the club hired yesterday from Ernst & Young could turn out to be one of the more sensible signings.The plan is to raise up to £15m which is nice start but still won’t reduce borrowings to a manageable level So more cost-cutting is going to be necessary. They could make a start with the car pool which, incredibly once provided transport for 76 of the club’s 250 staff.