Stock Commentary - Europe - week to April 24, 2006

EUROPEAN: bourses started and ended the reporting week to April 24 in negative mode, but a strong performance in the middle - when there were a spate of encouraging financial results - left them all higher. The best showing came from the PARIS market, which rose 4.2%, but there both tracked drug stocks underperformed, bioMerieux with a 3.5% rise and Sanofi-Aventis down 0.1%. AMSTERDAM saw Akzo Nobel leap 12.1% on the week, after the firm reported better-than-expected first-quarter figures. This also helped the overall chemicals sector in FRANKFURT, where Bayer rose 5.6%. Schwarz Pharma leapt 7.6%, having risen nearly 10% the previous week, on news of its deal with US drug giant Pfizer for rights to its fesoterodine which includes an upfront fee of $100.0 million for the German firm, plus royalties (Marketletter April 24). Merck KGaA was up a more modest 2.9%, after Deutsche Bank analyst Holger Blum reiterated his buy rating on the firm and raised his price target from 98 euros to 99 euros a share, in anticipation of the company posting robust first-quarter earnings.

LONDON: share prices moved up and down during the week. leaving the FTSE 100 with an overall gain of 1.1%. Drug majors AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline moved in opposite directions, the former up 1.8% and the latter down 1.4%. A big riser was PhytoPharma, which jumped 13.2% after the company presented an update on its pipeline developments (see page 18). Doing even better was little Protherics, which leapt 18.3% on the week, following rhe news that Legal & General Investment Management had increased its stake in the firm to 3.06%.