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ON THE RADAR: NO GAME CHANGER (0730 GMT)
Futures are still showing no clear direction at the moment
and sentiment seems as undecided as it was an hour ago.
There's nothing much in the flow of corporate news that
would provide a game changer even if Sunday's announcement that
Britain's health regulator had started an accelerated review of
AstraZeneca's potential coronavirus vaccine is obviously good to
take.
There's quite a lot of activity in the sector which has
outperformed the market during the COVID-19 crisis but is still
down about 9% year-to-date.
French healthcare group Sanofi made a 308 million euros
takeover offer worth for smaller peer Kiadis while Swiss
drugmaker Roche ROG.S won the European Commission's go-ahead for
its immunotherapy Tecentriq in combination with the older drug
Avastin for liver cancer.
German health technology company Siemens Healthineers also
said it expected sales to rise 5 to 8% in the coming year as
efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic allow hospitals to
resume routine care testing activities.
M&A in the battered banking sector is also continuing, as
shown by the announcement late on Friday that state-owned
Budapest Bank and MKB Bank and savings group Takarekbank (MTB)
would form Hungary's second-largest banking group.
In Greece, Alpha Bank said on Monday that it received two
binding bids for the sale of a bad loan portfolio worth about
10.6 billion euros ($12.35 billion).
In Italy, the government is working to support Monte dei
Paschi (MPS) after negotiating with the EU a turnaround process
which must include a merger with a strong peer, Italian Economy
Minister Roberto Gualtieri said on Saturday.
In another sector feeling the full heat of the pandemic,
Ryanair said it expects to fly between 50% and 80% of its
pre-pandemic traffic levels in the summer of 2021.
The Dutch government on Saturday also put on hold its plan
to bail out KLM, the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM after pilots
rejected a wage-freeze until 2025, Finance Minister Wopke
Hoekstra said.
On the bright side, Ocado, the British online supermarket
and technology group which has surfed on te lockdown wave,
raised its EBITDA expectations for 2020 and said it would buy
two robotics companies for a total of $287 million.
(Julien Ponthus and Stefano Rebaudo)
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EUROPE ENTERS NOVEMBER ON ITS TOES (0631 GMT)
European stock futures are trading just slightly in positive
territory but there's some pressure on the FTSE 100 derivative
which is currently down 0.3% as England gets ready for a new
lockdown this week.
With ongoing Brexit trade talks, investors seem reluctant to
take the lead from Asia where stocks bounced off one-month lows
thanks to upbeat Chinese manufacturing data.
Rather, the mood seems closer to oil markets where prices
were hit by worries that widening coronavirus lockdowns will
weaken fuel demand with traders bracing for turbulence during
the U.S. presidential election.
Anyhow, while the uncertainty remains high at the beginning
of this first session of November, sentiment should quickly get
its gearing after PMIs are published mid-morning for the main
European economies.
(Julien Ponthus)
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