UK housebuilder Vistry warns of ‘significantly’ lower profits amid Iran war uncertainty
One of the UK’s biggest housebuilders has said its profits will be “significantly” lower, as it was forced to cut prices after heightened uncertainty caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran.Vistry’s shares plunged 10.5% in early trading on Wednesday, hitting their lowest level in nearly 15 years, as it told shareholders its first-half profits would be hit by the fallout from the Middle East conflict.In a stock market update hours before its annual general meeting, the housebuilder, which owns Bovis Homes, Countryside and Linden Homes, said circumstances had changed since it last updated investors in March.It said: “The level of macroeconomic uncertainty has increased, and with it the range of potential outcomes for the current year.
”While the rate of sales was higher than a year earlier, buyers had become cautious in recent weeks, “reflecting uncertainty arising from the Middle East conflict”, it said.The war had “created some upward pressure” on the costs of building materials and worker wages, which were likely to continue into the second half of the year, it added.Vistry said it was “mitigating these where possible”, including by negotiating with its suppliers, and in the meantime was trying to lure buyers through bigger incentives and discounts.Together, those efforts are expected to weigh on profits, Vistry said.It has also halted its programme of buying its own shares “to prioritise debt reduction”.
“We expect [first-half] profit to be significantly lower than the prior year,” the company said, adding that it expected a partial recovery in the second half of the year, with profits due to be flat compared to 2025.It said adjusted pre-tax profits for the entirety of 2026 would probably be in the “middle of the range” of analyst forecasts.Vistry’s new chief executive, Adam Daniels, is now launching a company-wide “operational review”, with the results expected to be announced in September.Vistry has been no stranger to unexpected drops in profit, having issued three profit warnings in 2024.Bosses managed to stabilise the business, reporting a 2% rise in adjusted pre-tax profit for the 2025 financial year.
“Vistry’s trading update paints a bleak picture of the UK housing market,” said Anthony Codling, a managing director of equity research at RBC Capital Markets.“Today’s update contains good and bad news: progress is being made, but market conditions are providing little, if any, help and execution risks remain high.Vistry is not out of the woods yet, but it is one step closer to the edge of the forest.”Meanwhile, the estate agent Savills said that while it was trading marginally ahead of forecasts, it was expecting the Iran war to weigh on UK housing sales.“Within our key UK market … we have seen greater caution among both buyers and sellers since the onset of the Middle East conflict,” it said.
It added that its Middle Eastern business, which accounts for roughly 5% of its annual underlying profits, had also “slowed materially” during the crisis.
GameStop’s $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as ‘neither credible nor attractive’
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Who is Louis Mosley, the man tasked with defending Palantir against its critics?
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Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms
AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.The biggest success story is Cologne-headquartered DeepL, an online translator that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Used by governments, courts and half of the Fortune 500 list of highest-earning US companies, last year it was reported to have recorded revenues of $185.2m
Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, testifies in OpenAI trial
Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm
TikTok’s algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that TikTok’s algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections.Researchers created hundreds of dummy accounts and conditioned them to mimic real users’ behavior by watching a set of videos either aligned with the US Democratic or Republican parties. Then, they tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts’ For You pages, TikTok’s main feed.“We found a consistent imbalance,” they wrote in Nature.About 42% of US social media users say that these platforms are important for getting involved with political and social issues, according to Pew Research, but it’s not often clear how recommendation algorithms shape what appears in feeds
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