Modest growth at IMI

"I've been handed a deck of cards with a number of aces in it," Mr Selway told us, confirming that the first draft of a five-year plan is on his desk. IMI is already pulling its heating and cooling systems team out of 20 lower-margin emerging markets worth £4m of annual sales.

There's £1bn of fire-power for investment and acquisitions, too. Bolt-ons in the severe service area are expensive, but bigger targets lurk in the shorter-cycle specialist valves division. Here, organic sales returned to growth in the second half and demand from US truck manufacturers continues to pick up. Any broader improvement in industrial production, as seen in so-called PMI surveys, will benefit the business. A lag of about nine months before any upturn feeds through to IMI's numbers does, however, mean the benefit would not be felt until the second half.

At the lumpier severe services unit, ongoing margin improvement helped push up operating profit by a fifth to £117m. Mr Selway admits the level of demand for IMI's huge valves as part of safety upgrades in the nuclear industry has been a surprise. And orders from the oil and gas sector soared by 27 per cent, swelled by a huge contract in the Middle East, one of the company's biggest ever. Rising capacity in the LNG sector should also drive valve sales.

Citi downgraded its 2014 forecasts by 3 per cent due to currency pressures and slower short-term growth. The broker now expects adjusted pre-tax profit of £285m, giving adjusted EPS of 84.2p (from £279m and 71.7p in 2013).