Birmingham’s Clearwater Corporate Finance has reported a strong increase in M&A transaction figures for the year ending 31 March 2010. The firm partly attributes this to its increased sector focus and investment in cross-border work. The total value of deals that Clearwater advised on rose by 46 per cent to £436m in 2009 to 2010, compared with £299.6m in 2008 to 2009. This boosted the firm’s average deal value by 33 per cent to £22.9m, compared with £16.6m in 2009. The most active sector for the firm in terms of volume was retail and consumer, followed by industrial products.

Burton’s Punch Taverns, the UK’s biggest pubs company, has reported a fall in profits, having spent £2m a month to help support struggling tenants. Excluding one-off costs, like-for-like pre-tax profits for the six months to 6 March fell 20 per cent from £82m to £66m. Punch has sought to sell a large proportion of its pubs in order to pay off debts now worth £3.3bn. It said a total of £1.3bn had been paid off in the past 18 months. Chairman Peter Cawdron said the outlook for the pub industry as a whole remained “challenging”.

Severn Trent has called on Britain’s regionally focused water firms to trade water between themselves to help meet the challenges of keeping bills and debt at manageable levels. The Coventry company, which serves more than 3.7 million customers in England and Wales, said that allowing companies to transfer bulk treated water could be a way of relieving local shortages and saving money on investment in new resources. Although the industry was privatised 20 years ago, water companies operate locally rather than nationally, and customers are not able to switch between suppliers, as with gas and electricity.

This week, Midlands Business Insider editor Andy Coyne reflects on the challenges facing the recent crop of 42 under 42 entrepreneurs. Finding funding, he says, is a general complaint. “It can’t be said enough that these companies are the lifeblood of our regional economy. They have shown incredible bravery to put their heads above the parapet and set up something which, if successful, will provide employment and contribute positively to West Midlands plc.” For more from Andy, click here.

Anticipated cuts in public-sector jobs will make it difficult for the West Midlands to maintain the latest fall in unemployment announced yesterday. So says Katie Teasdale, head of policy at Birmingham and Solihull Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCI). “It is pleasing to see that unemployment fell by 6,000 to 253,000 – or 9.5 per cent of the working population – between December and February,” she said, but added that “it will be extremely difficult for the West Midlands to maintain this trend in the coming months.”

Birmingham cultural organisations contribute £271m to the region’s economy every year according to a new report. Research by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (MHM), detailed in Birmingham’s Cultural Capital, is intended to add further weight to Birmingham’s bid to be the UK City of Culture 2013. Stuart Griffiths, chief executive of Birmingham Hippodrome, said: “Birmingham’s Cultural Capital underlines the value of culture to Birmingham and the wider region – economically as well as in terms of image – to individuals and to wider society. For the first time, it provides a robust measure of the return on investment from public funds in the arts and supports the case for continued investment in culture.”

Birmingham engineering company IMI has reported a greatly improved outlook for its business. Only seven weeks after it announced its preliminary results, the firm says there has been a higher-than-anticipated level of orders in its fluid power division in the first four months of 2010, while most of the group’s divisions have seen “strong margin progression” in 2010 compared with a year earlier. A statement from the company read: “Overall revenues, which are broadly flat in the first quarter on a constant currency basis, are likely to finish the first half 3 to 4 per cent ahead of last year, with a 25 per cent growth in fluid power.”

Employers will need to manage those who have been affected by the recent volcanic activity and the ensuing travel chaos carefully, a leading employment lawyer has said. Employers are under no obligation to pay staff who missed work due to travel disruption, according to Victoria Garrad, an employment partner at Birmingham law firm HBJ Gateley Wareing. But she believes employers will look at the bigger picture. “My belief is that a good number of employers will pay staff, as these are unusual events and they will have good employee relations in mind,” she said.

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Tony Davis, the chief executive of MedilinkWM, the life-science industry association dedicated to driving forward relationships between industry, academia, and the public and private healthcare and social services, has been appointed chairman of the board of MedilinkUK and to the start-up board of the new Health Innovation and Education Clusters (HIEC) group. Davis was the first chair of MedilinkUK, and he will now hold the post for a second 12-month tenure.