Technology companies continued to slide. By far the worst hit was pan-European cable company UPC, which fell 37 per cent to a record low of €0.95. At the height of the bubble last year the shares were more than €80. Even before the bubble they had stood at a steady €20.
Loss-making UPC recently received €1 billion via a rights issue underwritten by its US parent group UnitedGlobalCom, which Liberty Media took control of in February. However, hopes for additional cash via UPC's minority shareholders did not materialise.
UPC says it has enough cash to run its business until 2003. It had €7.2 billion of net debt at the end of the first quarter of 2001. One analyst said the reason the share price kept falling was a combination of "no buyers and a lot of short sellers".
Some European cable companies such as Ono in Spain have been moving towards profitability by taking a narrower focus but UPC "has been spreading itself too thinly", the analyst said.
Market watchers have speculated that John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media and a former board member of AT&T Corp, might be looking to snap up the company, so it would be in his interest to see the share price fall.
In Germany SAP, which reports on Thursday, fell 3 per cent to €153.20, and Siemens was down 3.8 per cent to €61.38.
Eon pushed ahead as investors warmed to the group's €6.5 billion assets swap with British Petroleum.
The deal, which allows the German utility to focus more on core power generation and natural gas businesses, drew plaudits from brokers. Deutsche Bank saw it as possibly a quantum leap in Eon's restructuring efforts. The shares rose 0.3 per cent to €63.86.
Energy and chemicals group Norsk Hydro eased after second quarter earnings fell short of broker estimates as a result of slowing global demand and a further round of reorganisation charges. The stock ended off 1.8 per cent at 385 Norwegian krone.
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