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Let's take a look at some of the stocks on the move today in Europe. I'm Caroline Hepget with Lizzie burden Out, joined by Bloomberg reporter Chloe Malay. Good Morning, Good morning, John Mensis, Travel Essentials and in Motion. These are all the brands of W. H. Smith. What's been going on with that business?
Yeah, well, it's really kind of setback after setback for W Smith lately. So there were two big, three big things happening today, so we had a guidance scout, so as guidance by quite a bit. It also announced that it will launch a capital race to try and bolster its balance sheet, and then it also had one hundred and fifty million pound impairment charge. So all of that is essentially because of the Iran wars. So they now
only operate airport stores. Last year WH Smith sold their high street business to Madella Capital, so now they're only really doing this airport side of the business, which means that they're very exposed to any kind of air travel disruption, and so all of their airport stores in the Middle East are of course struggling because there's been so much
a disruption there to air travel. And then also more globally, there's obviously this week consumer confidence that we've been talking about for all retailers, and so that means that we are seeing fewer passengers and then also lower spend per passenger, and so that's really really weighing on performance on the sales for the wh Smith and it's not the first time this year that it had worn actually about that impact.
Back in Aprooid suspended its dividend on the back of that, saying that it needed to reduce debt and to bolster the balance sheet during this downturn. And then then today, as I said, this guidance capital raise impairment charge, so kind of a triple whammy there for that company. And then in addition to this, we also had this major accounting era in the US business that happened last year,
and so that led the CEO to resign. And then just yesterday the UK's Financial Reporting Council said that it had started an investigation into PWC's audit of the results in twenty twenty four, So overall, very bad time for wo Smith and we can see that reflected in those shows that really really slumped today. They were down about seventeen percent at the open. Next Dot Chloe, Sonofi and I'll let you pronounce the weird drug name. Well I was planning on not pronounced, so I don't know how
we're going to do this. So there's also set back for Sophie because it just halted a late stage trial for an experimental drug for a rare autoimmune disorder, which again I'm not going to try to pronounce, but it is a condition that causes progressive weakness and sensory impairment in the arms and legs. And so the late stage trial disappointed there. It's not the first drug recently from
Sonofi that's failed to impress. We also had one for dermatitis that disappointed, another one for MS that also showed mixed results. So it's kind of setback after setback there as well. And Setian has said that this really now sort of ramps up the pressure on the new CEO
to work on rebuilding this research and development pipeline. The previous year was actually removed for failing to bring new drugs to the market quickly enough, so I'm sure that the new CEO is now definitely feeling that pressure as well. And of course getting new medicines out is super important for drug makers that are seeing those patents expire for some of their best sellers.
Yeah, really proved, But is the name of the drug or at least that's how it's caled. Well, if anyone is interested in understanding one knows about it, I think it's worth mentioning just a brief word on st micro Electronics. Lizzie's been talking about the move in the share price today.
Yeah, so it was raised to a BI rating by Bank of America analysts and also they set a new street high price target for the company. Said that essentially has a lot of positive growth drivers, of course benefiting from data centers but also the satellite business, and also there's some recovery in industrials and autos. So overall doing quite well and of course quite relevant with all this air trade talk that we've been having over the last few days.
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