Stock Commentary - Europe - week to feb 6

EUROPEAN: bourses gyrated through the reporting week to February 6, pushed higher on February 1 by speculation on banking mergers and lower the next day, as oil stocks fell back on falling crude oil prices. In ZURICH, drug stocks were mixed, with Roche dropping 2.8%, after it announced a delay in its filing for CERA, a continuous erythropoietin receptor activator (see page 23), Novartis rising 1.9% and Serono falling 1.8%, as it posted disappointing results and had still not found a buyer for the company (see page 4). PARIS saw both tracked drug stocks outperforming the market, but with only small rises, +0.4% for Sanofi-Aventis and +0.2% for bioMerieux. On the FRANKFURT exchange, there was falls of 0.6% for Altana and 1.5% for Bayer, with the latter still suffering on the grounds of safety concerns on its antithrombotic Trasylol (aprotinin; Marketletter January 30). MorphoSys, on the other hand, jumped 6.3%, after it reported that 2005 (unaudited) revenues had reached 33.5 million euros ($40.1 million), compared with 22.0 million euros the previous year, and beating its own forecast of 31.5 million euros.

LONDON: share prices moved up and down in a narrow range, leaving the FTSE 100 just 0.1% lower. AstraZeneca ended the week down 1.7%, having dropped 3% on the day it released 2005 financial results which, while seeing profit leap 30%, led to a disappointment as its new chief executive admitted that its R&D pipeline was thin (see page 5). GlaxoSmithKline was down a marginal 0.3% ahead of its results (see page 3) and SkyePharma continued to slide, falling 6.3%, after the firm said it was reviewing its options as no buyer had come forward (see page 2).