Bloomberg en parle...

par The Bull , Guinée, mardi 03 janvier 2006, 23:32 (il y a 6908 jours) @ pasca711

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Oeneo SA, a French maker of wine barrels and corks, rose to a 15-month high after Le Figaro newspaper reported the company has begun selling a new natural-synthetic cork that reduces the risk of tainting wine.

The stock climbed as much as 16 cents, or 11 percent, to 1.60 euros and was at 1.55 euros as of 1:37 p.m. in Paris. The shares have declined 93 percent since the start of 2001. The Paris-based company began producing the ``Diam'' corks at a 15.5 million-euro ($18.4 million) factory opened last year in the Spanish region of Extremadura.

The managing director of Oeneo's bottle closures division, Dominique Tourneix, said in an interview in Le Figaro today that he expects the unit to break even, double its customers and sell 150 million Diam corks this year.

Sales of the Diam cork is central to Chief Executive Officer Marc Heriard-Dubreuil's plan to stem Oeneo's four straight years of losses. The company was founded in 2000 from the merger of the world's second-largest maker of corks with the largest maker of oak barrels.

A year ago Heriard-Dubreuil negotiated a two-year delay in repayments on 66 million euros of debt and sold new shares. He's in the process of selling or closing Oeneo's natural wine bottle cork businesses, shedding about a third of staff and focusing sales on wine-producing countries outside Europe.

Diam is made from 80 percent natural cork and 20 percent synthetic materials and has removed the molecule that causes cork tainting of wine. Oeneo worked with decontamination experts at France's Atomic Energy Agency to develop the cork.