A round-up of notable broker activity this morning from Europe'stop-ranked* analysts:
** Barclays ups Repsol to "overweight", onvaluation and sees potential for 2019 consensus upgrades
** In the same note, Barclays takes "a difficult decision"to cut rating for Italy's ENI to "underweight", sayingpeers have better industrial performance
** Jefferies ups Belgium-based biopharma co UCB to"hold" saying the risk from biosimilars to its drug Cimzia andR&D pipeline putting pressure on margins are both well-flagged
** "Novartis' portfolio and pipeline is wellconfigured to the Trump/HHS proposal for net pricing andaccelerated biosimilar adoption", Citi says, upgrading the stockto "buy"
** Telecom Italia gets an upgrade to "neutral"from Citi as the broker "doesn't rule out some good news"despite calling the stock a "structurally challenged" story
** Vertical Research raises Cobham to "hold", sayingit does look like the situation is becoming "less bad" in co'scommercial businesses and on the KC-46 program
INITIATIONS AND REINSTATEMENTS
** Morgan Stanley says Barry Callebaut 45% share inindustrial chocolate positions it well to benefit fromstructural trends, but starts with "underweight" citing lowerEPS growth and more cyclical risks for the co vs peers
** Berenberg initiates coverage for six European oil & gascompanies: "buy" for Total, BP and Repsoland "hold" for Royal Dutch Shell, ENIand Equinor
** Berenberg believes "the stars are aligning for integratedoil" with lower costs, rising production and increasingcommodity prices driving the highest free cash flow in thesector since 2006/7
(*Analyst rankings from Thomson Reuters StarMine. Scale is from1-star to 5-star with 5 being best. Analysts ranked on earningsaccuracy as well as relative performance of recommendations overtrailing 12-month & 24-month periods.)
BP (BP.)
