Commodities lead Europe stocks higher
LONDON (Reuters) - European shares rose by midday on Friday, helped by commodity stocks that tracked oil and copper prices higher, though pharmaceuticals limited gains as GlaxoSmithKline fell on a slew of price target cuts.
At 6:46 a.m. EST, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European stocks rose 0.4 percent to 1,301.81 points, with miners and oil shares the top weighted gainers.
Crude jumped $1 a barrel due to heating oil demand in the United States, pushing BP up 1 percent and Total 0.4 percent higher, while among miners, Kazakhmys and Antofagasta notched up gains of around 4 percent as copper futures rose.
But drugmakers were led lower by GlaxoSmithKlinethe top weighted loser in Europe, down 3.3 percent on a flurry of brokerage price target cuts after Thursday's shock warning from the group that earnings will fall in 2008.
Peer AstraZeneca, which issued a downbeat outlook last week, fell 2.7 percent and Roche slipped 1.1 percent.
Nordic telecoms group TeliaSonera tumbled 9.3 percent after posting unexpectedly weak earnings and disappointing investors with a goal to only keep margins at recent levels.
Stocks were also pressured by a fall in U.S. index futures, which pointed to a weak open on Wall Street.
Despite Friday's gains, the FTSEurofirst 300 is still down nearly 14 percent so far this year and analysts said the macro picture looked grim.
"The leading indicators continue to deteriorate around the globe, in some cases strongly," Gerhard Schwarz, head of global equity strategy at UniCredit, said in a note.
"In this environment, current valuations have lost importance as a support factor; the fears of a profit recession have increased substantially since the beginning of the year."
Heino Ruland, a strategist at FrankfurtFinanz in Germany, said: "The market is becoming aware that the crisis in the United States will indeed have an adverse impact on growth in Europe."
SOCGEN STAYS IN FOCUS, ALCATEL GAINS
Around Europe, Britain's FTSE 100 was up 0.2 percent, Germany's DAX up 0.6 percent and France's CAC up 0.3 percent.
Societe Generale fell 2.2 percent as French police widened an investigation into a trading scandal that lost the bank around $7 billion.
Franco-American telecoms group Alcatel-Lucent rose 3.9 percent despite giving a weak outlook and scrapping its dividend as its annual loss came in smaller than analysts had forecast. Continued...
