The 10 biggest business stories on Monday November 2

HSBC beats third-quarter expectations; Ryanair lifts profit forecast on fuller planes; High Street retailers are taking the fight to Amazon

High Street retailers are taking the fight to Amazon (Reuters)

1. HSBC reported a better than expected 32 per cent rise in pretax profit for the third quarter, thanks to reduced costs from fines and settlements with regulators

2. Budget airline Ryanair has lifted its profit forecast for 2016. The Irish airline raised its full-year estimation by 25 per cent to €1.2 billion, adding that it expects passenger numbers to the end of March to be around 104 million.

3. Oil prices fell in Asian trading hours on Monday as analysts expected weaker demand from China in upcoming months.

4. Martin Blessing, chief executive of Germany's second biggest lender, Commerzbank, is to step down next October as the bank reported third quarter profit that beats estimates.

5. Nissan posted an increase in revenue and net income for the first half of 2015. Net revenue rose to $48.7 billion, an increase of 15.3 per cent compared with the same period last year, according to the automaker.

6. HMV, Game Digital and Argos have closed the gap in the last three months thanks to growing sales of video games, CDs and DVDs at the expense of their online rival Amazon. Figures released this morning show that Amazon’s share of the physical entertainment market shrank by 1.2 percentage points in the 12 weeks to 27 October to 20.4 per cent. In contrast, HMV gained 1.1pp year-on-year, taking its market share to 13.6 per cent, thanks to special offers including its multi-buy campaign.

7. Hewlett-Packard has officially split into two entities on Sunday opening a new chapter for the US technology legend. The company founded seventy-seven years ago by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard became the foundation of the Silicon Valley is breaking up.

8. Chipotle Mexican Grill has temporarily closed 43 restaurants in the US over an E.coli outbreak.

9. Job vacancies outnumbered jobseekers in 41 out of 56 UK cities during September, research by job search engine Adzuna has revealed today.

10. Poor white men are the UK’s new underprivileged minority according to a new research by Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)