Companies diary: April 6 - April 10

Diary commentary from FT reporters; data and company announcements, unless otherwise stated, from Thomson Reuters. Company announcements are of information publicly available before last week. <

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Shareholders' meeting: Anglo American Platinum

? Samsung Electronics will announce preliminary guidance on its first-quarter performance, and the numbers will be scrutinised for signs of a rebound after a sharp fall in earnings last year.

Shares in Samsung have risen 6.2 per cent since the March 1 unveiling of its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, suggesting market bullishness about its prospects of regaining smartphone market share lost to low-cost Chinese rivals in 2014.

The grounds for such hopes will become clearer on Friday when the Galaxy S6 phone goes on sale. Samsung's new flagship phone was codenamed "Project Zero", reflecting the company's admission of the need to overhaul its top-end mobile offering after the Galaxy S5 undershot sales forecasts last year, leaving the company saddled with unsold stock.

Samsung has ditched unpopular features of the Galaxy S5 such as its "cheap" plastic exterior, and reviews of the new phone have been broadly favourable since its unveiling in Barcelona last month.

The new Galaxy's thunder threatens to be stolen, however, by Samsung's chief rival Apple, which is starting pre-orders of its debut smartwatch on Friday before deliveries begin on April 24. Research firm IDC predicts that Apple could sell nearly 16m of the devices this year - a figure that would allow it to jump far ahead of Samsung, which launched the Galaxy Gear smartwatch in September 2013. Simon Mundy

? Klaus Kleinfeld, Alcoa's chief executive, has been attempting, with a series of acquisitions and plant closures, to build up the company's specialised metals and components businesses and improve the competitiveness of its commodity operations.

First-quarter results published will give a measure of the success of those efforts.

Alcoa is one of the largest aluminium producers. In the first quarter of this year the average benchmark three-month forward price of aluminium on the London Metal Exchange was the same as in the equivalent period of last year: $1,785 per tonne.

Yet Alcoa's underlying earnings per share are expected to have almost trebled to about 25.2 cents for the first quarter of 2015, according to the average of analysts' forecasts, compared with 9 cents for the equivalent period of last year.

The earnings will reflect developments including the $2.85bn acquisition of Firth Rixson, a jet engine components manufacturer, which closed in November.

There will also be a contribution from the $10.8bn Saudi Arabian joint venture with Ma'aden, which began commercial operations in September.

The repositioning of the business has continued into this year, with the announcements of the $1.5bn acquisition of RTI International Metals and the shutdown of 74,000 tonnes of smelting capacity in Brazil, part of a new review of Alcoa's upstream commodity operations that could affect 500,000 tonnes of capacity, or 14 per cent of the group's total.

By strengthening its specialist products businesses, Alcoa hopes to limit its exposure to the fluctuations of the commodity aluminium price, which was staging a recovery up until November but has since fallen about 14 per cent.

Analysts expect earnings to continue to grow for the year as a whole, although they think the pace of growth will moderate.

The average forecast for 2015 earnings per share is about $1.07, up17 per cent from $0.92 last year. Ed Crooks

EARNINGS

Alcoa Q1 $0.25 ($0.09)

? Investors will look for corporate progress with its second-quarter results after the head of Walgreens Boots Alliance's foray into the political arena this year.

The latest numbers for the newly combined group come after a year in which the largest drug retailing chain in the US kept its headquarters there despite efforts to move its domicile to Britain in a tax inversion deal.

Walgreens last year acquired the 55 per cent of Boots that it does not already own in a cash and shares deal worth about $15bn following a Walgreens shareholder vote on December 29. The combined company has 370,000 staff, 12,800 stores in 12 countries and drug distribution business in 20 countries.

Walgreens had bought 45 per cent of Boots for $6.7bn in 2012, four years after its billionaire executive chairman Stefano Pessina and KKR, the private equity firm, bought the UK's largest pharmacy chain by number of stores. At the time, it was Europe's biggest buyout and the £10bn transaction contained an option for the US company to acquire the remaining portion three years later.

Mr Pessina, executive chairman of Alliance Boots and a board member of Walgreens, was serving as acting chief executive when the two pharmacy chains merged this year, but still plans to return to a strategy role. The 73-year-old will be executive vice-chairman of the combined US-based company, responsible for strategy and dealmaking and chair a new board-level strategy committee.

Ornella Barra, Mr Pessina's long-term partner and chief executive of wholesale and brands at Alliance Boots, is executive vice-president of Walgreens Boots Alliance.

This year, Britain's Labour leader Ed Miliband accused the head of the pharmacy group of being part of an "unholy alliance" between Britain's Tory party and tax-avoiding companies, risking a wider confrontation between Labour and the business community.

More broadly, healthcare groups have led the way in dealmaking this year, with a further three being announced last week, among them UnitedHealth Group acquiring prescription management company Catamaran in a $12.8bn all-cash deal. Simon Greaves

EARNINGS

Walgreens Boots Alliance Q2 $0.951 ($0.91)

? When Carrefour reports sales during the first quarter, investors may have a hard time discerning any clear trends. For one thing, January sales tend to distort the underlying business and it is likely that a pattern for 2015 will only become apparent once the Easter break is over.

But, as Oddo, the Paris-based investment bank notes in a recent report, Carrefour is confident about the coming months. It has increased capital expenditure to €2.5bn - €2.6bn this year, which includes its ongoing renovation of hypermarkets in France, by far its biggest market.

Oddo is also confident that prices should stabilise this year after a price war among the leading groups during 2014. The Paris-based group estimates full-year sales this year of €78.5bn, 5.1 per cent higher than during the previous year.

Of that, sales in France are likely to be €35.3bn, stable compared with the previous 12 months. The bright spot is expected to be Latin America, where sales this year are likely to reach €15bn, a growth of 8.1 per cent compared with 2014 - and 8.8 per cent in constant-currency terms. Adam Thomson

Trading and sales update: Carrefour

Results forecasts, from Thomson Reuters, are for fully diluted, post-tax EPS in local currency for the stated fiscal period. The comparable period of the previous year is bracketed. Non-UK reporting periods are broken by quarter: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. UK periods are designated: Q1, H1 (first half), Q3 and FY (full year). Thomson Reuters calculates mean earnings estimates based on a majority policy where the accounting basis used for each company estimate is that used by the majority of contributing analysts [email protected]

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