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* FTSE 100 hits highest since Feb 2020 as miners jump
* German real estate firms rise as rent cap rule overturned
* Deliveroo slips despite reporting jump in orders
* STOXX 600 Q1 earnings expected to jump over 50% - data
(Updates to close)
By Sruthi Shankar
April 15 (Reuters) - European stocks closed at a record high
on Thursday as a rally in commodity prices lifted mining stocks
and a slate of upbeat earnings reports offset worries about the
pace of COVID-19 vaccinations.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.5% in its
third session of gains, with miners jumping 1.5%.
Travel & leisure stocks closed up 0.1% after hitting
a record high earlier in the session.
The UK's commodity-heavy FTSE 100 rose 0.6% to its
highest level since February 2020 as a surge in metals prices
lifted shares of companies such as Rio Tinto, Anglo
American and BHP.
While European stocks have now recovered all of their
pandemic-induced losses from last year, they have lagged their
U.S. counterparts due to a choppy COVID-19 vaccine roll-out as
well as a new wave of infections across the continent.
U.S. drugmaker Johnson & Johnson this week delayed
the roll-out of its COVID-19 shot in Europe, while Denmark said
it would drop a similar vaccine from AstraZeneca over
the risk of blood clotting.
"The euro zone economy might lag others more than we had
expected previously because of the concerns around AstraZeneca,"
said Paul Jackson, global head of asset allocation research at
Invesco.
"Notwithstanding that, once they are vaccinated, European
countries have more to gain than most others."
With U.S. economic data and corporate earnings reports
reinforcing expectations of a swift global economic rebound,
attention this month will turn to the quarterly earnings season
in Europe.
Analysts expect earnings at STOXX 600 firms to rebound more
than 50% in the first quarter following a slide of nearly 40% in
the same quarter a year earlier, according to Refinitiv I/B/E/S
data.
On Thursday, Swiss engineering company ABB rose
3.1% after raising its full-year sales outlook, while French
advertising group Publicis gained 3.3% as it returned
to organic growth for the first time since before the pandemic.
Shares in Publicis' British rival WPP rose 0.5%.
German real estate companies Deutsche Wohnen, LEG
Immobilien and TAG Immobilien rose between
0.9% and 2.5% after the Constitutional Court ruled that a law
putting a rent cap on apartments in Berlin was invalid.
Britain's food delivery company Deliveroo slipped
3.8% even as its quarterly orders more than doubled in its first
trading update since its underwhelming market debut last month.
Norwegian lender Sbanken soared 30.3% after the
country's largest bank DNB agreed to buy the smaller
competitor in a deal worth 11.1 billion Norwegian crowns ($1.3
billion).
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru, additional reporting
by Sagarika Jaisinghani, editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Kirsten
Donovan)
