Bruker and Sigma Only Gainers as BCW Index Falls
Bruker shares ended a two-week slide this week with a 2.6-percent gain, while Sigma-Aldrich inched up 0.7 percent as the only two gainers among the 15 multiplatform molecular biology tools companies whose share prices are tracked weekly on the BioCommerce Week Index.
Bruker BioSciences closed the five-day tracking period Tuesday at $4.29, compared to last week’s $4.18 after announcing on Monday a $3-million second phase of a cost-cutting initiative originally announced in September (see story, page 9). Bruker shares have closed up on four of the last six weeks.
Sigma’s stock was up for the second week in a row, closing at $60.89, up over last week’s $60.46.
Harvard Bio shares led 13 losers on the week with a 2.7 percent drop, closing at $4.35 for the week after last week’s close of $4.47.
PerkinElmer dropped 2.6 percent even after affirming analysts’ expectations for FY ‘05 in its guidance conference call on Friday (see story, page 1). The company’s shares closed at $22.10, down from last week’s $22.70.
Investors responded to Invitrogen’s strategic alliance with Illumina (see story, page 1) with a 2.5 percent drop, as IVGN closed at $65.95, down from $67.63 last week.
Beckman Coulter, Bio-Rad, Waters, Applied Biosystems, Agilent, and Molecular Devices all saw share-price drops of over 1 percent. Beckman and Bio-Rad fell 1.9 percent; Waters was down 1.7 percent; Applied Biosystems and Agilent fell 1.6 percent; and Molecular Devices was off 1.3 percent as acquired Axon co-founder Alan Finkel and his wife Elizabeth sold 500,000 shares for $10.7 million.
BD, GE, Thermo, and Stratagene shares all dropped fractions of a percent.
Overall, the index closed at $34.39 for the week, dropping 1.3 percent from last week’s close of $35.40 on a day when all of the major indices closed at 52-week highs. The BCW Index has finished up for seven out of the last nine weeks.
— Mo Krochmal ([email protected])
