Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Petronas Chemical climbs , boost from upgrades

KUALA LUMPUR: Shares of Petronas Chemicals rose in active trade on Wednesday, March 9 in line with the positive market sentiment and upgrades by foreign and local research houses.

At 3.28pm, Petronas Chemicals was up 35 sen to RM6.80 with 41 million shares done while its call warrants, PChem-WA added 3.5 sen to 35.5 sen.

The FBM KLCI rose 7.23 points to 1,524.89. Turnover was 1.09 billion shares valued at RM1.50 billion. There were 495 gainers, 242 losers and 253 stocks unchanged.

JP Morgan Research set a new December 2012 target price of RM7.80 based on 2.5 times FY12 estimated book value.

'Petronas Chemicals remains one of our top picks in the region due to its competitive feedstock structure, product slate and volume growth in 2011. Key downside risk to our forecasts is rapidly falling crude oil prices and capacity utilisation lower than our expectations,' it said.

Meanwhile, Credit Suisse Research said during its marketing trip in Europe and the US over the past two weeks,'' it said Petronas Chemicals attracted attention.

'Petronas Chemicals was of particular interest because it is: (1) most leveraged to rising oil prices among the petrochemical companies; (2) a beneficiary of the upturn in the petrochemical cycle; (3) cheap versus its peers and among the Malaysian big-cap stocks,' it said.

Credit Suisse has an Outperform at RM6.45 and a target price of RM7.50.

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