Investors are expected to exploit the widest price gap in Alibaba Group Holding shares, after a rally in Hong Kong drove its valuation above those listed in New York. The opportunity, though, may be fleeting in a volatile market.The e-commerce giant's equity has gained 22.6 per cent this month through July 21. Its American depositary receipt, whose value is equivalent to eight Hong Kong-listed shares, rose by 19.6 per cent in the same period.An investor who exchanges the ADRs at the equivalent of HK$249.88, based on overnight closing prices in New York, could on-sell them in Hong Kong for HK$254.80 each, assuming no transaction costs.As both instruments are fungible, ADR holders would need to switch into local shares before they can exploit the 2 per cent price differential in Hong Kong, a trade known as arbitraging in stock market parlance.Jack Ma, China's richest man, controls about 50 per cent of the voting interest in Ant Group. Photo: EPA-EFE"The price gap will lead investors to do the arbitrage trade," said Louis Tse Ming-kwong, managing director of VC Asset Management. "Investors who have bought Alibaba in the US since its listing in 2014 will find it is a good opportunity to shift into Hong Kong shares now."The bounce in Alibaba shares follows an emphatic rally in its stock after an announcement by Ant Group, the operator of Alipay payments system valued at US$200 billion, about a concurrent stock offerings in Shanghai and Hong Kong.Alibaba, which owns about one-third of Ant based on recent filings, is the owner of the South China Morning Post.The arbitrage opportunity has also arisen amid a bullish mood across mainland and Hong Kong bourses since the Chinese government imposed a controversial national security law in the city on June 30 to help restore social order.A slew of mega listings involving Chinese technology firms has also underpinned the flow of hot money into the Hong Kong financial market. Since Alibaba's secondary listing in November, its US-listed peers including JD.com and NetEase have also followed suit.Their "homecoming" may have prompted index compiler Hang Seng Indexes Company to create a gauge to track 30 of the largest technology firms in Hong Kong. The Hang Seng Tech Index will kick off on July 27. Their entry into the benchmark Hang Seng Index could be decided in August, after the compiler concluded a round of public consultations in May.Still, the window of arbitrage opportunity can open and shut rather quickly, just like in December. Alibaba stock fell 3.5 per cent to HK$248 as the broader market tanked, narrowing the price gap. It remains to be seen how the ADRs will react. Hong Kong stock exchange to get new tech index tracking Alibaba, Tencent and 28 other peersOn top of arbitraging, the jostle for Alibaba shares may have also been driven by such early positioning by fund managers who typically track index-component stocks. Alibaba alone accounts for more than 8 per cent weight in the proposed tech index, based on a simulation."Many international fund houses could take the opportunities" to switch, said Tom Chan Pak-lam, chairman of Hong Kong Institute Securities Dealers, an industry body of brokers. "They may not move back to the US markets for fear that the Trump administration may restrict US funds from investing in Chinese tech firms."Investors have switched into 57.64 million of Alibaba shares in Hong Kong since its secondary listing, according to exchange data. There are 4.81 billion shares kept in the Hong Kong clearing house as on Monday, or 22.4 per cent of its capital."Hong Kong is the home market for Chinese tech companies," Chan added. "Hong Kong investors are more familiar with these companies. As such, it may be natural for Hong Kong-listed shares to be trading at a premium over those in the US."This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2020 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/3hrazsc

(Bloomberg) — Wirecard AG had repeated contact with Angela Merkel’s chancellery in the months before its collapse, according to a chronology of events by her office.Merkel has come under pressure to clarify her interactions with the digital payments company after the chancellery confirmed that the German leader promoted Wirecard during a trip to China in September 2019 after her office was informed of ongoing investigations.Opposition lawmakers are threatening to call for a parliamentary investigation as they press Merkel’s administration over how it pursued fraud allegations against Wirecard, a member of Germany’s benchmark DAX index.Underscoring the impact of the scandal, the finance committee in Germany’s lower house of parliament plans to interrupt the summer recess to hold a special session on July 29 to discuss the firm’s collapse. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz and Economy Minister Peter Altmaier have been invited.Munich prosecutors on Wednesday scheduled an ad hoc press conference to inform about the “latest developments” in their Wirecard probe. The investigators declined to say beforehand what the announcement will be. The press conference is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. local time.Here’s a time line of interactions between the German government and Wirecard as laid out by the chancellery:Nov. 19, 2018: Digitalization czar Dorothee Baer visited Wirecard’s offices in AschheimNov. 27, 2018: Wirecard’s then-CEO Markus Braun requested a meeting with Merkel and her chief of staffJan. 22, 2019: Merkel’s office turned down the request and instead offered an appointment with Merkel’s economic adviser Lars-Hendrik Roeller, which Braun canceledAug. 23, 2019: Finance Ministry relays information to Roeller about Wirecard, including market-manipulation probes, in preparation for a meeting with a company representativeSept. 3, 2019: As part of preparations for a trip to China, Merkel meets Wirecard representative Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a former defense minister who resigned in disgrace over plagiarism. Guttenberg follows up with an email about Wirecard’s plans to acquire Chinese company Allscore Financial to gain a license in the Asian countrySept. 5-7, 2019: Merkel mentions Wirecard’s plans during her trip to China. “At the time of her trip she had no knowledge of possibly severe irregularities at Wirecard,” the chancellery said, adding that the company wasn’t part of the delegationSept. 8, 2019: Roeller informs Wirecard of the discussion and offers additional followup. He asked for and had contact with Germany’s ambassador in Beijing and China’s ambassador in Berlin about Germany’s economic interests in China, but didn’t further follow up on the Allscore acquisitionSept. 11, 2019: Roeller has meet and greet with Wirecard officials, who speak broadly about Asian activitiesMay 20, 2020: Braun holds a telephone discussion with Roeller. He rejects press reports of accounting irregularities and promises a thorough clarification.June 10, 2020: As the head of a DAX company, Braun takes part in a video conference about Germany’s coronavirus tracking app with MerkelJune 30, 2020: Merkel informed of the accounting scandal and Wirecard’s insolvencyAsked whether Roeller should have warned Merkel about Wirecard before her China trip, Merkel’s deputy spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said on Wednesday: “If we had known what we know today about a financial scandal which led to the bankruptcy of a DAX company, this is true, but the knowledge at that point of time was a different one.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/30Fwd4Y

Novavax CEO Stanley Erck and three other executives would earn the options, worth $101 million at Tuesday’s closing stock price, if the company’s vaccine candidate enters a mid-stage clinical trial – regardless of its eventual success, according to a company filing. The incentive plan, which has not been previously reported, allows the executives to start exercising the options a year after Novavax starts the so-called Phase 2 trial, as it expects to do soon.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/3eSfDUw

(Bloomberg) — For the first time since the West’s five energy supermajors were created in the early 2000s, all of them are set to post a quarterly loss.Once a money-making machine, Big Oil is now relying on ever-increasing amounts of debt, raising the pressure on highly prized dividends. BP Plc may cut its payout for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon disaster a decade ago.The sheer scale of global oil demand destruction — some 30 million barrels a day, or a third of regular usage, in April — sent energy markets into a second-quarter tailspin, from which they’ve only recently started to recover. Worst-in-a-generation oil prices combined with OPEC production cuts, collapsing refining margins and millions of barrels of unsold crude mean no facet of Big Oil’s business has emerged unscathed.“There really hasn’t been anywhere to hide, even in the integrated model,” said Noah Barrett, a Denver-based energy analyst at Janus Henderson,which manages $294 billion. “Terrible quarter, but it’s behind us now. The focus will be on how the recovery takes shape.”DividendsFor BP, analysts from banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. are expecting a cut in the payout of anywhere between 30% and 65%, a historic move for a company that has been a cornerstone dividend payer in the U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index for decades. It would reduce the amount of debt needed and free up cash for Chief Executive Officer Bernard Looney’s high-profile strategy to eliminate almost all of the carbon emissions from the company’s operations and the fuel it sells to customers.The move would follow Equinor ASA and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which cut its dividend for the first time since World War II earlier this year.Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total SA aren’t expected to follow suit, though analysts at Goldman reckon a cut at Exxon “could enable a financially healthier company.”DebtBig Oil borrowed some $80 billion during the quarter, giving it a whopping cash balance of $194 billion to see it through an intense period of losses as well as scheduled debt repayments this year and in 2021, according to Jefferies Financial Group Inc. But this will increase net-debt-to-capital ratios, a key measure of indebtedness.European majors will remain more indebted than their U.S. rivals, but dividend cuts may bring some relief. Despite having low debt coming into the crisis, Exxon’s borrowing is rising rapidly and over time will become a cause for concern, according to Morgan Stanley and Goldman. Exxon’s net debt climbed by $8.8 billion in the the quarter and will surge to $78 billion by the end of 2022, Goldman said. Chevron's agreement to acquire Noble Energy Inc. this week includes the assumption of about $8 billion of additional borrowings. That still leaves the company well-placed to pay its dividend, CEO Mike Wirth said.RefiningRefining is seen as the “hedge” part of the Big Oil integrated model. When crude prices are down, refining is often unaffected because of lower feedstock costs, but that’s an “oversimplification,” according to Paul Cheng, a New York-based analyst at Scotiabank. When no one’s buying petroleum because of lockdowns to fight the global pandemic, all parts of the oil business suffer.A simple measure of refining profit, known as a 3-2-1 crack spread — it assumes three barrels of crude makes two of gasoline and one of diesel-like fuels – slumped to its lowest level for the time of the year since 2010. Refineries have also been running at reduced levels and changing their product mix due to a worse market for jet fuel compared with gasoline.Exxon, which has massive refining operations, will be affected the most by this trend. Chevron may also suffer from challenges to its operations on the West Coast, Cheng said.EarningsResults will reflect a tumultuous quarter in which Brent crude averaged about $33 a barrel, less than half the level a year earlier, but with a massive spread between the high and low points of some $20. That throws further uncertainty into the mix for trading and derivatives.“Our team has forecasted earnings for 72 quarters and 2Q20 seems the most difficult of them,” Jason Gammel, a London-based analyst at Jefferies Financial Group Inc., said in a note to clients.ImpairmentsShell and BP got the bad news out of the way in June by disclosing they would write down as much as $22 billion and $17.5 billion respectively in the second quarter as the pandemic hammered the long-term valuations of everything from oil to liquefied natural gas. Chevron took an $11 billion hit in December related to its U.S. natural gas assets. Exxon is yet to take such an impairment.The two U.S. majors may come under pressure from analysts to reveal more information on how they value their assets because they don’t provide the same disclosures as their European peers. Climate-conscious investors want Exxon and Chevron to disclose their long-term forecasts for crude prices as the Covid-19 pandemic heightens uncertainty about the demand outlook for fossil fuels. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, California State Teachers’ Retirement System and Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors with $30 trillion of assets, this month called on them to provide such estimates, in part to avoid ending up with uneconomic assets.Shell and Total report on July 30,  Exxon and Chevron on July 31, and BP on Aug. 4.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/3jx0Lyr

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Many of the recent stories are familiar, but still distressing and perplexing.There was the gentleman in Tucson who waited 27 days to get results from a Covid-19 test, only to discover he didn’t have the virus and the two weeks he spent in quarantine had been pointless. There was the nonprofit nursing home chain in the Phoenix area that waited five days for test results, only to learn that several staff members and residents had the coronavirus; the asymptomatic staffers had roamed freely until the results arrived. And there have been many tales of Arizona residents waiting a week, on average, to get test results — and sometimes much longer — even though their state has been a coronavirus hotspot for more than a month. Texas, Florida, California and many other newly resurgent corona-states have similar stories.Test results, to be useful, should arrive in less than two days. If they take longer, opportunities to isolate infected people and trace their contacts with others wither, undermining broader containment efforts. So why can’t the wealthiest and most innovative country in the world have more rapid-fire testing during a pandemic?Several other wealthy countries already set good examples around testing that the U.S. might have emulated, measures including national testing strategies and aggressive contact tracing. The U.S. also had a lag between its first coronavirus outbreaks in the spring and the current surge, which gave private and public stakeholders in the testing community a chance to catch up. Yet even though testing has ramped up massively — to about 780,000 tests a day, from 145,000 per day in early April — some experts say that to combat the coronavirus effectively the country should be conducting at least 5 million tests a day. Federal health authorities recently said the U.S. has already reached its daily testing capacity, but by fall should have the ability to conduct about 1.3 million to 1.7 million tests a day. That would be an improvement, but clearly not enough — especially if a second coronavirus wave washes across America come October or November.Even now, the spread of the virus has outpaced testing increases. (In Arizona, in-state testing volume jumped 50% while the growth in new Covid-19 cases exceeded 100%.) More testing isn’t a solution anyhow if results aren’t prompt. And the sheer number of cases in the U.S. adds to the problem. During the spring, coronavirus cases peaked at about 36,000 a day. Last Thursday, more than 75,000 infections were reported — a new record. That same day, a bipartisan group of health care experts, scientists, former senior public officials and investors released a report warning of further economic and social devastation if Covid-19 is left unchecked.“Testing is the only way out of our present disaster, and it will remain the case until a vaccine or effective therapeutics are widely available,” noted the report, which was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. The authors call for $75 billion in immediate public spending to buttress the testing effort, which would be “the single best investment America could make in averting an even more tragic and pending disaster.”Even if you don’t believe the coronavirus has brought on an apocalypse, it still makes sense to fix and fortify national testing to protect public health before other disasters arrive. A civilized, equitable and well-functioning country shouldn’t be satisfied with the current testing regime. Rather, it should set to work to establish effective public-private partnerships, embrace the role of the federal and state governments as problem solvers, and hold the private sector to higher standards.While the Trump administration and the federal government have drawn ample criticism for leadership failures around testing, the private sector has also proved unequal to the epic challenges a pandemic presents.Federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, state labs and hospitals all provide testing services, but commercial labs dominate the market. The clinical testing business, which generates annual revenue of about $80 billion, has a number of big players, including ARUP Laboratories, BioReference Laboratories, Mayo Clinic Laboratories, and Sonic Healthcare Ltd. But two aggressive competitors, Quest Diagnostics Inc. and Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, dominate the field.Quest earned $858 million on revenue of $7.7 billion in 2019. The company says its operations “touch the lives” of 30% of the U.S. adult population and it boasts of relationships with about half of all physicians and hospitals in the country. LabCorp earned $824 million on revenue of $11.5 billion last year. It says it interacts with 3 million patients weekly, controls proprietary data derived from 35 billion lab test results (which includes about 50% of the U.S. population), and has contributed to the development of all 50 of the country’s top-selling drugs.Both companies were assembled through decades of mergers and acquisitions, diagnostic ingenuity and an unrelenting focus on expanding their market share. Quest and Labcorp are preferred or exclusive providers for many of the largest private health insurance companies in the U.S., and they process a large portion of tests covered by Medicare and Medicaid.Quest, in its securities filings, describes the testing market as “fragmented and highly competitive.” But Quest and LabCorp’s sales suggest they jointly control about a quarter of the business. Smaller competitors have complained over the years that Quest and Labcorp’s tight relationships with insurers and the federal government make it hard for them to break into health care networks to offer alternatives. Some consumers have alleged that the companies charge exorbitant prices for tests administered to uninsured patients, and both companies have drawn scrutiny for possibly overbilling Medicare and Medicaid (charges that they’ve denied).In the spring, questions about how readily insurers would cover charges from all companies for Covid-19 tests, along with many patients’ reluctance to visit doctors’ offices, brutalized the testing industry’s bottom line. Quest and LabCorp seem to have weathered this better than most; the stocks of both companies are trading around their 52-week highs. Yet even they haven’t been able to meet the testing demands imposed by Covid-19.As the virus rampaged in June and July, both companies, having rapidly upped their testing game, still lagged. A three-to-five-day turnaround time for test results they announced at the end of June gave way to a four-to-five-day delay by the first week of July. After announcing the second delay, Quest said it didn’t expect to get any faster until the coronavirus stopped spreading nationally. Don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. In an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday, a senior Quest executive said “it will be impossible” for his company “to increase coronavirus testing capacity to cope with demand during the autumn flu season.”That leaves patients, hospitals and society in a bind. Consider Arizona, which has the highest Covid-19 positivity rate of any state. The virus has spread there so quickly and deeply that a public health official in the state’s most populous county has said contact tracing may have become worthless. Sonora Quest Laboratories — a partnership between Quest and the Banner Health hospital chain — handles 80% of Covid-19 tests in Arizona, making it the largest testing network in the state. And it can take 11 days for Sonora Quest to deliver test results.Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican caught flat-footed by the outbreak, recently channeled $1 million in state funds to Sonora Quest to help buy equipment to process tests more quickly. He’s also started pushing a new testing partnership with Arizona State University, and he’s working with the federal government to set up free testing sites. Perhaps he will have better luck than Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat, who said she requested federal testing sites in April and was rebuffed by the White House.But Ducey comes late to his testing push, having been reluctant to impose other public health measures such as stay-at-home orders, masks and lockdowns. And regardless of his new incentives, it’s not clear how quickly Sonora Quest can ramp up testing and improve turnaround times.Another governor decided to circumvent the major labs altogether. New York’s Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has advised his state’s residents to patronize local labs rather than Quest or LabCorp to get timely test results. About 70% of New York’s tests are now processed by 200 local labs that return results in one to three days, the state said.Smaller labs around the country have excess capacity they’re unable to deploy because they haven’t been able to break into the insurance networks dominated by the big guys. And labs of all sizes struggle to operate at full capacity because a balkanized supply chain forces them to compete against one another for frequently scarce resources.Those resources include reagents (the chemicals labs use to detect the presence of a virus), swabs for collecting patient samples, personal protective equipment, tubes and other media used to transport samples, and proprietary test kits that work with diagnostic machines from companies such as Hologic Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. and Abbott Laboratories. Those kits are a special challenge because they’re not interchangeable: Labs that use machines made by Hologic, for example, can’t use kits designed for machines made by Thermo Fisher. A dearth of testing kits was a problem in the spring. Now there’s a dearth of testing machines. All of this has become a tar pit for labs and their employees working around the clock.To top it off, the testing industry has technology and data challenges. As the New York Times recently detailed in a bit of startling reporting, some test results are still transmitted via fax machines and traditional mail, 80% of Covid-19 test results lack demographic information, and 50% have no associated addresses. Privacy requirements explain much of the problem, but it nonetheless hobbles testing during a pandemic.Will companies sort this out on their own? No, because they’re competing against one another. Can states help? No, they’re competing against one another, too. That leaves the federal government as the logical referee. It’s Washington that can define and coordinate a national testing program, provide financial incentives to companies to speed things up, help steer resources so as to rationalize supply chains, and revivify a dilapidated public health infrastructure undermined by years of staffing and budget cuts.However, the possibility of federal action collides with longstanding suspicion, and often outright hostility, in the U.S. toward centralized public health guidance and services. Countering that sentiment, and driving a national testing strategy, will require creative and purposeful leadership from Washington — and from the White House in particular.When Covid-19 first escalated in the spring, President Donald Trump briefly came to recognize there was battle to be fought. “I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president,” he said in March. “It’s a medical war. We have to win this war. It’s very important.”But one month after setting up a coronavirus task force in the White House and putting his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of expanding testing, Trump effectively shifted primary responsibility for the battle to the states. It was as if, during World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt had told governors to devise their own military strategies and produce their own tanks, ships and planes.During the brief period the White House took the reins, some progress was made. More testing sites were opened and significant supply chain problems were tackled. An effort to offer drive-through testing services in commercial parking lots got underway. But Trump’s promise in the spring that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” wasn’t true then and it’s still not true today — largely because the president failed to forge a national consensus around testing in partnership with governors and public and private laboratories.More recently, Trump has repeatedly denounced testing. And the White House has been trying to cut billions of dollars for testing and other public health initiatives that Republicans in Congress want baked into the next round of bailout funding. At a press briefing on Tuesday, Trump declined to say whether he personally supported further funding for testing. In the midst of a national crisis, that animus toward testing is reckless and dangerous.Whoever is elected president in November may be enjoying his victory just as Covid-19 unleashes a brutal winter surge. Whether that’s Trump or Joe Biden, he will need to put the weight of the federal government behind initiatives to bolster public health services generally and break the testing logjam specifically.An obvious first step would be for the White House to help speed up the creation and distribution of simple point-of-care tests that can be used in doctors’ offices, private residences, nursing homes, schools — anywhere they’re needed outside of laboratory settings, especially in underserved, low-income communities. These tests can produce results in an hour or less, but also have significant accuracy problems. There’s already ample research underway to improve POC tests, and the federal government has approved a small number for emergency use, including devices from Abbott, Quidel Corp. and Becton, Dickinson and Company. But there’s much work to be done there.The U.S. has been playing catch-up on coronavirus testing almost from the start, ever since the faulty Covid-19 test the CDC sent to labs in early February turned out to be disastrously ineffective. Since then the government, which previously handled the development and distribution of diagnostic tests, has granted a series of emergency approvals for private companies to produce new tests. In contrast, Germany and South Korea have kept looser leashes on test development, bolstering their ability to test more broadly and effectively. The U.S. government would do well to continue loosening some of its testing regulations.On the other hand, the government could use its regulatory powers to suppress any anti-competitive practices that some of the bigger testing companies may be engaging in. A more muscular interpretation of the Defense Production Act would also enable the White House to resolve myriad supply problems, whether by ensuring the availability and compatibility of testing equipment or by smoothing access to such basics as swabs and reagents.The CDC, which Trump has undermined, could help institute a more effective testing regime by working with its traditional network of state public health agencies and private companies — if its budget was fortified and its regulatory and legal powers were enhanced. The CDC currently offers guidelines that states can take or leave. An empowered CDC should be authorized to devise enforceable rules that help rationalize how the testing industry operates.Analysts, experts and medical professionals from ideologically diverse institutions — including the American Enterprise Institute, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation — have recently issued detailed reports calling for bolder steps to streamline and reinvent the U.S. testing system. All of them advocate a broader role for the federal government, ranging from coordinating information and supplies and supporting POC innovations to providing financial incentives, establishing private-public mega-labs, and establishing task forces to help carry out these initiatives.The Harvard study goes so far as to call for the creation of a federal “Pandemic Testing Board” with “strong but narrow powers that has the job of securing the testing supply and the infrastructure necessary for deployment of testing.” The authors liken this to the War Production Board that the U.S. empowered for three years during World War II to supervise the production of weapons and military supplies.That makes sense to me. After all, we won World War II and we’re now at war with Covid-19. Even Trump knows that.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/2Bm7tGl

Gold mining royalty firm Franco-Nevada extended Monday’s breakout. Gold prices hitting long-term highs while silver prices soaring. Not exactly a hedge vs. weak market.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/3hqMrFX

Shares in Aurinia Pharma (AUPH) surged 9% in Tuesday’s extended trading after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted the filing of its New Drug Application (NDA) for voclosporin, a potential treatment for lupus nephritis (LN). This is a serious inflammation of the kidneys caused by the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).Encouragingly, the FDA granted a faster six-month Priority Review for the application (instead of the usual ten months), with a PDUFA decision date set for January 22, 2021.The FDA also told Aurinia that they are not currently planning to hold an advisory committee meeting to discuss the application. The FDA can change this decision based on review of the pending NDA.“People living with LN are in need of an advanced therapy that quickly drives the disease into remission and mediates kidney damage,” said Peter Greenleaf, CEO of Aurinia. “We will continue to collaborate with the FDA during their review process and in parallel build our commercial readiness for a potential approval and commercial launch in the first quarter of 2021.”Voclosporin, an investigational immunosuppressant, is a novel and potentially best-in-class calcineurin inhibitor (CNI) with clinical data in over 2,600 patients across indications, Aurinia says.The NDA for voclosporin is supported by data from a substantial global clinical program including two pivotal studies, Phase 3 AURORA and Phase 2 AURA-LV.Shares in Aurinia are trading down 28% year-to-date, yet analysts have a bullish Strong Buy consensus on the stock with 7 back-to-back buy ratings. Meanwhile the average analyst price target stands at $24.50 (69% upside potential). (See AUPH stock analysis on TipRanks).HC Wainwright analyst Ed Arce reiterated his buy rating on the stock and $32 price target after Aurinia presented new patient subgroup data from the Phase 3 AURORA pivotal trial.“All pre-specified subgroup analyses of LN patients based on age, sex, race, biopsy class, region, and prior mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) use favored voclosporin over an active control of current standard of care of MMF and low-dose corticosteroids in the AURORA trial” Arce told investors on June 5.As a result the analyst continues to view the robustness of renal response across race and ethnicity, as well as the rapid onset of effect, as key points of clinical differentiation likely to drive physician uptake of voclosporin as the new standard of care (SOC) regimen for LN.Related News: NuVasive Spikes 5% After-Hours On Sharp Procedure Rebound Intuitive Surgical Delivers Strong Quarter; But Analyst Says Sell Now Is Novavax’s (NVAX) Super-High Valuation Justified? This Analyst Says ‘Yes’ More recent articles from Smarter Analyst: * Tesla's Elon Musk Qualifies For $2B+ Payout Backed By Share Rally * Texas Instruments Provides Upbeat Sales Outlook; Top Analyst Sees 18% Upside * OrganiGram Plunges 9% On Soft Top Line; Weak Gross Margins * Intuitive Surgical Delivers Strong Quarter; But Analyst Says Sell Now

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/39hPygB

Texas Instruments (TXN) sees third-quarter sales beating analysts’ expectations as the work-from-home environment continues to drive demand for the chipmaker’s products for personal computers, tablets and servers.Texas Instruments projects current-quarter revenue will be in a range of $3.26 billion to $3.54 billion, which is above analysts’ expectations of $3.12 billion. Earnings are expected to be in the range of $1.14 to $1.34 a share compared with the 98 cents forecast by an average of analysts.“We will maintain high optionality so we can continue to support customers' demand, particularly during a time when their ability to forecast may continue to be limited,” said Texas Instruments CFO Rafael R. Lizardi. “We have informed our customers that lead times on our products remain short, and more than 40,000 products are available for immediate shipment on TI.com.”In the quarter ended June 30, the chipmaker saw net income increasing to $1.38 billion, or $1.48 per share, from $1.31 billion, or $1.36 per share, a year earlier. Meanwhile, total revenue in the reported period, fell about 12% to $3.24 billion mainly due to a 40% drop in sales to the automotive sector. However, it beat analysts’ estimates of $2.94 billion.Personal electronics was up over 20% sequentially and up about 10% compared to the same quarter to a year ago. “This can best be explained by work-from-home trends and TI being in a position to support unforecasted demand in second quarter,” the company said.Texas shares gained as much as about 3% in extended market trading after declining less than 1% to $135.48 at the close on Tuesday.Following the financial results, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann raised the stock’s price target to $160 (18% upside potential) from $135 and maintained a Buy rating, saying that the company is the premier analog pure-play at a time when the semiconductor sector is in the early stages of a cyclical recovery“Management's posture of continued industry demand cautiousness while actively maintaining healthy inventories (distribution inventories continue to decline) to respond to un-forecasted demand (optionality), could disappoint some investors but this is just TI, being TI; prudently conservative,” Mosesmann wrote in a note to investors. “We like the setup into the back half of 2020 and for 2021 on TI being a much stronger company than in the past, excellent execution, and the TI.com go-to-market presence that we see continuing to lead to analog share gains over time, and also in embedded processing segments.”The rest of the Street is for now staying on the sidelines when it comes to recommending the stock. The Hold analyst consensus is based on 3 Holds and 4 Sells versus 4 Buys. With shares up 5.7% since the start of the year, the $129.73 average analyst price target implies 4.2% downside potential in the shares over the coming year. (See TXN stock analysis on TipRanks)   Related News: Logitech Ramps Up Annual Profit Outlook As Q1 Income Leaps 75% Synaptics Snaps Up DisplayLink For $305M In All-Cash Deal; Top Analyst Lifts PT IBM Pops 5% in Extended Trading After Quarterly Profit Beats Expectations More recent articles from Smarter Analyst: * OrganiGram Plunges 9% On Soft Top Line; Weak Gross Margins * Intuitive Surgical Delivers Strong Quarter; But Analyst Says Sell Now * Salesforce Quietly Shuts Down Einstein Voice Assistant, Einstein Voice Skills * Boston Scientific Scores FDA Green Light For New LAAC Heart Device

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/3jr72vz