South Africa's Aspen H1 earnings up 22 pct as acquisitions kick-in
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Africa's biggest generic drugmaker Aspen Pharmacare Holdings Ltd reported a 22 percent increase in half-year profit on Thursday as contributions from recent acquisitions offset the impact of unfavourable currency moves. Aspen has made an aggressive push overseas to benefit from patent expiries on best-selling name-brand drugs worth billions of dollar. It spent more than 20 billion rand in the past year and half buying businesses from GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis to a factory from Merk & Co.. The company, which makes nearly half of sales overseas, said first time contributions from some of these business helped counter the impact of more than 340 million in foreign exchange losses after the dollar strengthened against the group's major trading currencies. Aspen said normalised headline EPS came in at 569 cents in the six months to the end of December, compared with 468.1 cents a year earlier. Headline EPS, the main profit measure in South Africa, strips out certain one-off items. Sales for the Durban based company increased 47 percent to 19 billion rand ($1.61 billion). Shares in the company rose 1.6 percent to 426.78 rand by 1030 GMT, outpacing a 0.4 percent gain the JSE Top-40 index. ($1 = 11.8022 rand)
