Greene King ends Wrexham FC deal

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28 September 2011 Last updated at 14:24 GMT The future of Wrexham Football Club finally agreed The Greene King brewery and pub chain has ended its sponsorship deal with Wrexham Football Club.

The announcement came two days after Wrexham Supporters' Trust (WST) agreed a deal to take over the club.

Wrexham said the two-year sponsorship deal, agreed last April, was ending because the Racecourse ground is now owned by Glyndwr University, which has its own beer sale deal.

Greene King said an amicable agreement had been reached.

After months of negotiations, WST and the club agreed a takeover deal on Monday.

On Wednesday, outgoing club chief executive, Jon Harris, said Wrexham FC could no longer honour its agreement with Greene King because ownership of the Racecourse had been transferred to Glyndwr University, which has a beer sales deal with another company.

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It's been a tough eight months because of the nature of what we have been trying to do here”

End Quote Jon Harris Wrexham FC chief executive A Greene King spokesperson said: "We originally agreed a sponsorship deal with Wrexham FC in good faith which included providing beer for the club and both stand and shirt sponsorship.

"We have met with the club to discuss how the sale of the ground has impacted on our sponsorship deal.

"It has transpired that the new owners have been left in a position where they don't have the ability to meet our original agreement as the right to sell Greene King beer was not transferred from the ground to the new owners as part of the sale.

"As a result we have reached an amicable agreement to end our sponsorship with immediate effect so the new owners are free to find new sponsors. We wish Wrexham FC and its loyal fans the very best of luck for the future."

A club spokesman expressed sadness at the end of the partnership as Greene King was a "fantastic sponsor" but it gave the new owners the chance to seek a new shirt sponsor.

Jon Harris said he expects to leave his job as caretaker managing director at the end of the week.

The former Shrewsbury Town general manager arrived at the Racecourse in January and took on the role of chief executive in May after failing with his own bid to buy the club.

He said the supporters' trust had made it clear they had their own people to run the club.

"It's been a tough eight months because of the nature of what we have been trying to do here.

"But it's a magnificent club with great potential and supporters who are second to none.

"I wish the trust well and now I'll just have to wait and see what the future holds for me. I have had a great time here and I think the majority of people have appreciated what I have tried to do."

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VIDEO: Steve Jobs: Apple's driving force

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6 October 2011 Last updated at 03:56 GMT Help

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Video: sugar Lord remember Steve jobs

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Amazon unveils Kindle Fire tablet

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28 September 2011 Last updated at 16:42 GMT Amazon boss Jeff Bezos unveils the Kindle Fire

Amazon has unveiled a colour tablet computer called the Kindle Fire.

The $199 (￡130) device will run a modified version of Google's Android operating system.

Until now, the company has limited itself to making black and white e-readers, designed for consuming books and magazines.

As well as targeting Apple's iPad, Amazon is likely to have its sights on rival bookseller US Barnes & Noble, which already has a colour tablet.

The Kindle Fire will enter a hugely competitive market, dominated by Apple's iPad.

Amazon will be hoping to leverage both the strength of the Kindle brand, built up over three generations of its popular e-book reader, and its ability to serve up content such as music and video.

In recent years, the company has begun offering downloadable music for sale, and also has a streaming video-on-demand service in the United States. Those, combined with its mobile application store, give it a more sophisticated content "ecosystem" than most of its rivals.

Continue reading the main story 7" IPS (in-plane switching) display1024 x 600 resolutionCustomised Google Android operating system$199 (￡130)Weighs 413 grammesDual core processor8GB internal storage"It's the price and the backup services that make it really exciting," said Will Findlater, editor of Stuff magazine.

"Content is the big differentiator. It's what every other platform has been lacking, except the iPad."

Amazon's decision to opt for a 7" screen, as opposed to the larger 10" displays favoured by many rival manufacturers was a cause for concern for Ovum analyst Adam Leach.

"This screen size has undoubtedly helped them achieve a lower price point for the device but so far this form factor has not been popular with consumers, we shall see if this is related to other aspects of those devices other than its screen size. "

Digital dividend Digital content has already proved itself to be a money-spinner for Amazon.

Although the company has never released official sales figures for the Kindle, it did state - in December 2010 - that it was now selling more electronic copies of books than paper copies.

Its US rival, Barnes & Noble, has also enjoyed success with its Nook devices.

In October 2010, the company unveiled the Nook Color, which also runs a version of Android, albeit with lower hardware specs than many fully featured tablets.

While the Nook Color is largely focused on book and magazine reading, some users have managed to unlock its wider functionality and install third-party apps.

Amazon has dropped the keyboard from some of its Kindles in favour of touch

The Kindle Fire's $199 (￡130) price tag undercuts the Nook Color by $50 (￡30) and is significantly cheaper than more powerful tablets from Apple, Samsung, Motorola and others.

It is due to go on sale on 15 November in the US, although global release dates are currently unavailable.

Price cuts

Alongside the Kindle Fire, Amazon also announced a refresh of its Kindle e-readers.

The entry level device has had its keyboard removed and will now sell for $79, down from $99. Amazon UK announced that the new version would retail at ￡89.

A version with limited touchscreen capability, known as the Kindle Touch, will sell for $99. Only the US pricing has been announced so far.

"These are premium products at non premium prices," said Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. "We are going to sell millions of these."

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VIDEO: Youth unemployment rise in Eurozone

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4 October 2011 Last updated at 21:07 GMT Help

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IBM's bet on data-centric computing

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3 October 2011 Last updated at 23:01 GMT IBM's Watson computer was a proof of concept, says Dr Menon Each week we ask high-profile technology decision-makers three questions.

This week it is Dr Jai Menon, the chief technology officer and vice-president for technical strategy for IBM's Systems and Technology Group.

He holds 52 patents and is arguably most famous for his contribution to the Raid storage technology. Computing giant IBM has more than 426,000 employees, generating an annual turnover of just under $100bn (￡64.6bn) and profits of $14.8bn.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

There are always multiple problems, but one problem that we are focused on is providing our customers with IT solutions that are flexible to their needs, but easily consumable.

Our customers have many different kinds of workloads they have to run, for example transaction-based systems that have to serve thousands or millions of users at the same time, 24/7.

Or analytics systems with fewer users that require deep complex computation. The challenge is how do you satisfy all these different kinds of tasks?

The are two different approaches: You can standardise it all on one kind of computer, and use that for all their business tasks. But that doesn't really work: it's like saying 'buy just one type of car', and hope it meets the needs of a small family, and doubles up as a pick-up truck, a big van or an MPV [people carrier].

So the other approach is to realise that you have lots of different types of workload, and you buy systems that are optimised for these tasks. That's clearly preferred to the first approach. The challenge over time is that with lots of different workloads, you end up with many kinds of computers, and then there's the challenge to make that consumable.

We are working on a technical approach that will create a system that has all the pieces that make up a computer system. You build this system with different kinds of processors, and there are memory and storage and networking elements, and then you have very sophisticated software that comes with the system. And the software is able to construct the kind of computer you need.

So if you need a lot of computing power, medium-sized storage and not a lot of memory, that's what the system provides. And once the task is running, and you need more memory or computing power, then the system will make that choice for you.

And when your workload goes away, you simply deconstruct the system.

This is not just virtualisation, where you have one kind of standardised computer, with a standardised processor and a certain amount of storage and memory.

You need to be able to assign more than what a single computer can do.

This is very much customer driven. What our customers are telling us is: 'Come up with newer better computers, that take up less floorspace and are faster.'

People have amazing amount of workload, and require lots of different virtualisation environments, but they also have too many different systems.

So I've got to let customers reuse their existing assets, skills and software.

The software is key - it's a universal resource manager.

What's the next big tech thing in your industry?

The next big thing in our industry are new kinds of computers. I call them data-centric computers, because right now our computers are very processing-centric computers.

These new computers can extract and find information in data that can aid human cognition. When we created [supercomputer] Watson, it combined hardware and deep analysis software that we designed to work together.

We are moving away from computers that compute, to computers that can extract information from the huge amounts of unstructured data - because every two days we generate more data than all data from the dawn of civilisation until 2003.

Watson was just an example to prove the point. There are very interesting business problems out there, and rather than having to be programmed these computers learn as they go along.

They are data-centric rather than compute-centric.

For example, they could work as a physician's assistant, providing all the knowledge, the data about the patient itself, manage the doctor's notes.

Right now, all we do is Google a medical problem, and we get back 20 documents, and we have to go through them and rate them and find the answer.

In the future, the computer will give you an answer with a probability to go with that, and that's so much better than what we do today.

That to me is the next big technology thing. And it also applies to government. Computers could help governments find answers to tax issues, zoning laws, financial issues.

From a technology point of view, we still need a few things that to support this - more memory in the system, and solid state memory and storage, and obviously the deep software.

This is not Skynet [as described in the Terminator movies]. People always worry about new technology. When pocket calculators were introduced, people said we would forget to multiply; when computers came they said we would forget how to spell.

In reality all these computers are assistants, and they save us time so that we can focus on doing the things that only humans can do.

Pilots, for example, have always had things to helped them fly a plane. But at the end of the day I would not fly without a real human on-board.

What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever made - either at work or in your own life?

This is probably an unusual kind of answer, but the timing of innovation is really important. My experience is, as innovators, we are always frustrated if we are too late.

We say: "I had the idea first, why did product development not move fast enough?" But my biggest mistake was in pushing an innovation too early to market, and I've learned from that.

What I've learned is that you really have to prepare the market. You have to shape the market, prepare your customers, create a standard, get enough people to buy into the standard.

And if you introduce your product too early and you haven't done that, then your product doesn't do very well. You just create a vicious circle, because you don't have the profits from the product to recycle and improve and innovate the product.

And then, once the market is ready and prepared, then you will be hesitant because you tried this once before and it didn't work. Then it gets very difficult to reenter the market.

For example in the storage space, we developed this IP [internet protocol] driven storage attached to the network. We shipped it in 2001, and it didn't do so well in the market.

This is now a $3bn market - 10 years later it's a great story, but by pushing it too soon, maybe five years too soon, it soured our executives as to whether this really was a good idea.

And then it is hard to catch up later.

Timing is everything. You can be wrong on both sides, too early and too late, and both are bad.

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VIDEO: Build up a cash cushion, says Alvin Hall

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30 September 2011 Last updated at 10:22 GMT Help

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Cairn makes strike in Sri Lanka

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3 October 2011 Last updated at 08:42 GMT The discovery of natural gas is the first in Sri Lanka for decades Edinburgh explorer Cairn Energy has made its first gas strike in Sri Lanka through its Indian subsidiary.

The offshore well was the first to be drilled in the country for 30 years.

Cairn India made the discovery after drilling almost a mile down offshore in the Mannar Basin, Sri Lanka.

Simon Thomson, chief executive, Cairn Energy said: "Cairn is delighted with this frontier exploration discovery, the first well in Cairn India's three well drilling programme in Sri Lanka."

Cairn Energy is in the process of selling off 30% of its 52% stake in Cairn India to the Vedanta Resources and recently won shareholder and Indian government approval for the deal.

The company's focus has moved to Greenland since it announced it was reducing its stake in its Indian unit.

However, it has had a number of disappointments after turning up several dry wells.

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VIDEO: Germany passes eurozone vote test

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29 September 2011 Last updated at 13:55 GMT Help

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VIDEO: Cargill chief executive on its success

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29 September 2011 Last updated at 08:43 GMT Help

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Tesco profits grow but UK subdued

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5 October 2011 Last updated at 07:00 GMT UK sales were "weak", Tesco said Supermarket group Tesco has reported a rise in half-year profits despite a fall in underlying sales in the UK.

Pre-tax profit for the 26 weeks to 27 August was ￡1.9bn, up 12.1% on a year earlier. Group sales rose 8.8% to ￡35.5bn, but like-for-like UK sales excluding VAT and petrol fell 0.5%.

The company highlighted "excellent growth" in Europe and Asia but also "subdued demand" in the UK.

Rival Sainsbury's reported slightly better like-for-like sales.

Excluding petrol but not VAT, Sainsbury's sales rose by 1.9% for the first six months of the financial year. The equivalent figure at Tesco was a rise of 0.5%.

Sainsbury's chief executive Justin King said: "We have delivered a good sales performance in a tough consumer environment."

'Weak' sales

Tesco contrasted the "challenging conditions" in developed countries, particularly the UK and the Irish Republic, with "continued strong growth in emerging economies".

The company said "weak" sales in the UK were not helped by slowing demand for non-food items, particularly in electronics and entertainment, two of its largest product groups.

It also highlighted the high price of petrol and its impact on general consumer spending.

Despite the fall in like-for-like sales, trading profits in the UK rose by 4.5% to ￡1.3bn.

Tesco makes about two-thirds of its sales and profits in the UK.

Like-for-like sales excluding petrol grew in regions outside the UK, with the US seeing sales growth of almost 12%. The company said its plan to break even in the country in the 2012-13 financial year was "showing promising early results".

Like-for-like sales in Europe grew by 1% and in Asia by 3.8%.

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Online traders' 'refund failings'

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6 October 2011 Last updated at 12:15 GMT By Kevin Peachey Personal finance reporter, BBC News The test purchases were part of an EU-wide campaign to check consumer rights More than half of traders failed to give full refunds to customers who pulled out of online purchases during a cooling-off period, tests have shown.

Under consumer rights law, all costs - including delivery costs - should be refunded if consumers decide to cancel the contract in the allotted time.

Test purchasing by European authorities found that in 57% of cases, traders failed to reimburse delivery costs.

A BBC investigation highlighted the issue in December.

Online shopping

When buying from the internet, unlike in a shop, customers are unable to examine the goods before they buy them.

As a result, a cooling-off period is available to people shopping online. In the UK, shoppers have seven working days to return items bought on the internet that they do not want to keep. In some European countries it is longer.

There are a few exceptions, such as unwrapped CDs and perishable goods, but otherwise the money should be credited to the buyer's account as soon as possible and within 30 days at the latest.

Continue reading the main story In the UK, there is a cooling-off period of seven working days for unwanted itemsTraders should refund within 30 days, unless previously agreed otherwiseDelivery charges should also be reimbursedSome perishable goods such as foods and flowers are exemptRights for goods that are not of satisfactory quality are the same as the High Street - a refund, replacement or repairAny refund should include delivery costs incurred by the customer.

During a mystery shopping exercise by European authorities in 2003, these delivery costs were not reimbursed in 53% of cases.

But 305 tests earlier this year, by the European Consumer Centres' Network, found that this had increased to 57%, although refunds for the items themselves were paid in 90% of cases.

"This needs to improve in order to ensure a continuous positive development in cross-border e-commerce," a spokesman for the UK European Consumer Centre said.

In 7% of all the purchases made, the trader did not inform the customer about the price of the delivery costs at all.

Changes

Some results of the test purchases do make better reading for consumers.

For example, the delivery rate for items ordered online improved significantly compared with 2003, as had the number of items delivered within 14 days. There was also an increase in the number of websites offering information in more than one language.

Many of the current consumer rules operating in EU countries pre-date the widespread use of the internet by shoppers.

So MEPs have approved plans to update the rules, including a 14-calendar-day cooling-off period for online purchases.

Governments will have two years to implement the changes.

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PM warns over eurozone break-up

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2 October 2011 Last updated at 12:27 GMT David Cameron warns that the UK cannot shield itself from the crisis in the eurozone Prime Minister David Cameron has warned that it would be "very bad" for the UK if the eurozone was to break up.

Speaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, he said the debt crisis in the eurozone was "a threat not just to itself, but also a threat to the UK economy, and a threat to the world economy".

He reiterated that eurozone leaders had to take quick and decisive action.

Mr Cameron said that, as 40% of UK exports went to the eurozone, it could not shield itself from the problem.

The prime minister said the UK government had "a very clear view" of what needed to be done, and that it was pushing this with its partners in Europe and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

He said eurozone leaders had to strengthen the region's financial mechanisms, ensure the greater involvement of the IMF, and deal decisively with the high levels of sovereign debt.

Mr Cameron added: "Action needs to be taken in the next coming weeks to strengthen Europe's banks, to build the defences that the eurozone has, to deal with the problems of debts decisively."

He said these emergency measures were needed before any long-term plans of more economic coordination across the eurozone were introduced, such as a single tax system.

Greek fears

European stock markets again fell heavily on Friday due to concerns about the debt crisis in the eurozone.

Continue reading the main story Use the dropdown for easy-to-understand explanations of key financial terms:AAA-rating GO The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower's debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is miniscule.It meant that for the three months from July to September, the main UK share index, the FTSE 100, recorded its biggest quarterly fall since 2002.

The concerns centre on Greece, the most indebted eurozone nation.

Greece needs its next 8bn euros (￡6.9bn; $10.9bn) instalment of European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout loans by the middle of this month to be able to continue paying its civil servants and teachers.

This tranche was delayed in September after EU, IMF and European Central Bank officials said the Greek government was not carrying out sufficient austerity measures.

The wider fear is that Greece will ultimately default on its debt payments, and of the knock-on effect this would have on banks across Europe which own Greek government bonds.

Some commentators also warn that Greece may ultimately have to leave the eurozone, plunging the region's economic and political systems into chaos.

Eurozone leaders and the IMF are now continuing to work on a solution to the debt crisis, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel due to speak again this week.

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Barclays heads UK complaints list

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28 September 2011 Last updated at 14:35 GMT There were more than 250,000 complaints to Barclays in the first six month of the year More complaints were made about Barclays than any other banking brand by UK customers in the first half of the year, figures have shown.

The bank received 251,563 complaints, with 53% of closed cases upheld in customers' favour, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) figures show.

Barclays said it had cut complaints by 14% compared with a year earlier.

Other brands high on the list included Lloyds TSB (181,907), Santander (168,888) and NatWest (147,109).

The data pulls together figures released in recent weeks by banks.

Insurance complaints

Nearly 10,000 complaints were filed every day to financial institutions, with a total of 1.85 million made in the first six months of the year.

The FSA figures showed that, among the most complained-about banking brands, Santander was the most likely of the major brands to deal with cases within eight weeks.

It closed 98% of cases within that timeframe. This compared with 74% at Royal Bank of Scotland, 77% at Lloyds TSB, 86% at NatWest, 89% at Barclays and 90% at HSBC.

Complaints were dominated by those about payment protection insurance (PPI), especially after banks lost their legal challenge on PPI rules in April.

PPI is supposed to cover borrowers' loan repayments if they fall ill, die, or lose their jobs.

But mis-selling cases led to new rules on how cases should be dealt with, and also created an extra compensation bill running into billions of pounds for the banks.

Adam Scorer, of watchdog Consumer Focus, said: "This issue continues to dog the financial sector and is a big test of its commitment to treating consumers fairly.

"All firms need to deal with outstanding cases and make sure everyone affected is treated efficiently and fairly."

Complaints about banking, rather than insurance and some other categories, fell by 22% compared with the same period a year earlier.

'Good progress'

The FSA's complaints figures are published relating to banking brands.

Barclays headed the list but said the number of complaints had fallen by 14% compared with the same period a year earlier.

"We want to get it right every time. When we do get it wrong, we apologise, try to correct it quickly and identify how to prevent it from reoccurring," said Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclays Retail and Business Banking.

"We have made good progress in reducing complaints with a substantial and sustainable reduction in banking complaints by nearly a third.

"However, there is much more to be done and we are working hard to further improve our service to our customers, putting them at the heart of our business and getting it right first time, every time."

The largest group - Lloyds Banking Group - had most complaints when all its brands were added together.

Some complaints that are unresolved by the banks themselves end up with the independent Financial Ombudsman Service. It recently said that the largest number of these complaints, in the first half of the year, also related to Lloyds Banking Group.

It also said that nearly two-thirds of the new complaints made in the six months to the end of June were about PPI.

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Making Olympic technology work

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28 September 2011 Last updated at 23:07 GMT Weighty task: Making the technology for the London Olympics work is a "huge responsibility" says chief integrator Michele Hyron Each week we ask high-profile technology decision-makers three questions.

Michele Hyron: Viewers will be able to choose which competition, nation or athlete they want to follow

This week it is Michele Hyron of Atos,?chief integrator for the Olympic Games in London. She is responsible for leading the consortium of IT partners to design, build and operate the massive IT infrastructure that will support the London 2012 Games.

Ms Hyron leads a team that include employees from Atos and technology partners LOCOG, as well as volunteers.

She already has nearly 10 years of Olympic Games experience, serving as operations manager at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, integration manager at Athens 2004 and quality manager at the winter Games in Salt Lake City 2002.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

As the chief integrator for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, I suppose that people would expect me to have a long list of problems. After all, if the IT doesn't work, then effectively the Games can't take place.

It is a huge responsibility, and one that everyone takes extremely seriously, but this is now my third Olympic Games and Atos's sixth.

While the technologies advance every time and we are faced with fresh problems as we integrate new applications, we have developed a robust process that ensures that we test everything in the lab over and over again.

By the time we get to the Games themselves, we have covered an extensive testing program.

In fact, our work is analogous to training pilots in aircraft simulators.

We throw every possible scenario at the IT teams - from the failure of the communications network to someone accidentally pulling out a plug - and ensure that we can recover from these without anyone at the Games or watching on TV noticing that a problem has even occurred.

The most challenging aspect of the job, though, is undoubtedly the massive increases in the amount of data which has to be organised and channelled with split-second timing.

It is estimated that between the dawn of civilisation - some four to five thousand years ago - and 2003, mankind had created about five exabyte's of data, which is 5bn gigabytes.

Across the world, we now create that amount of data every two days and the volume of business data is doubling every 18 months.

The Olympic Games is no exception. For Beijing, we produced 50% more data than we handled at the Athens Games.

The London 2012 Games will see us process significantly more information than we had at Beijing, as we meet the demands of sports fans worldwide for the latest information on their favourite events and sports stars, and deliver this information via broadcasters, internet and mobile.

What's the next big tech thing in your industry?

Atos is a global business with a presence in more than 42 countries and a workforce of 78,500 business technologists. In many respects our industry covers virtually every aspect of IT and every industry sector.

However, from my personal perspective it is the magic that we can now work with metadata to create a completely different TV experience for watching sport which is the most exciting.

We will have the ability to offer viewers the chance to choose exactly which competition, nation or athlete they want to follow, and enable them to follow more than one sporting event simultaneously.

This digital quality service will be offered over fixed and mobile devices, and is designed to allow sports fan to watch events that aren't even being broadcast on a regular programme.

So unlike the type of technologies people are used to today, with a personal video recorder (PVR) integrated into a set-top box allowing them to select when they view broadcasts, this new approach makes the viewer the director, selecting what they watch, when and from what angle.

Our approach incorporates face-recognition technologies, and this means that a viewer can either have automatic selection of the best shot or a recommendation that they can accept or reject.

The amount of data that has to been managed to offer this service is staggering, and by 2014 we estimate that more than 90% of all data traffic in the world will be video content.

It will be the equivalent of 32 million people streaming Avatar in 3D continuously every month.

What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever made - either at work or in your own life?

As a complete beginner in software development, at the start of my career, I enjoyed developing a program in Assembler.

I made it as compact as possible, playing with the stack and using other tricks. It was great fun!

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that this piece of code was completely unmaintainable.

My colleagues were still blaming me for this work years after I moved on to other things.

It was a really good lesson so early on in my career, and taught me the importance of looking ahead and appreciating the impact of what I do, not just tomorrow but years into the future.

It also taught me that while playing with software is really fun - and it is - delivering programs that are robust and practical is what counts.

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Chinese demand boosts Yum profits

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5 October 2011 Last updated at 01:37 GMT Yum Brands is planning to expand its presence in China even further to cater to growing demand Fast food giant Yum Brands has reported a jump in third-quarter profit as sales at its Chinese outlets continue to grow.

Yum reported a net profit of $383m (￡248m) in the three months to 3 September, up from $357m last year.

The owner of Pizza Hut and KFC said same-store sales in China rose 19% during the period.

With close to 4,200 outlets, China accounts for more than 40% of Yum's profits.

"This tremendous sales growth, combined with our expectation to open a record 600 new restaurants this year, gives us even more confidence our China business model is as strong as ever," said David Novak, chairman and chief executive officer of Yum Brands.

Domestic trouble

While it continues to grow in China and other emerging markets, Yum Brands has been struggling in the US market.

The company said like-for-like sales at its US outlets fell as much as 3% in the third-quarter, resulting in a 16% drop in profit during the period.

"We're obviously disappointed in our US performance," Mr Novak said.

Analysts said the company was still suffering the effects of the lawsuit against Taco Bell earlier this year, over allegations that it used large amounts of additives and little actual meat in its beef products.

Though the company denied the claims and the lawsuit was dropped, it damaged Yum's brand image.

"They've got a job to do PR-wise to repair that," said Jack Russo of investment firm Edward Jones.

"It looks like it's stabilising and we'll get to the point next year where they'll be bouncing up against some easier comparisons so that will help," he added.

Yum said that it was planning to launch innovation and productivity initiatives in the US in a bid to improve sales and profits.

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