news blog from Magen

* Company leaves full year guidance at $3.60-$3.70/shrOct 18 (Reuters) - Forest Laboratories Inc said on Tuesday its fiscal second-quarter earnings fell, though new product sales helped drive a 9 percent increase in sales.The company’s net profit fell to $249.8 million, or 91 cents a share in the second quarter ended Sept. 30, from $286.1 million, or $1 a share, a year ago. Revenue rose to $1.17 billion from $1.04 billion a year ago.Sales rose 9 percent to $1.13 billion, from $1.037 billion a year ago.Analysts were on average expecting earnings excluding one-time items of 99 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. They were expecting revenue of $1.16 billion.Forest stands to lose roughly a quarter of its revenue after its antidepressant Lexapro loses patent protection early next year. The company’s Alzheimer’s disease drug, Namenda, loses patent protection in 2015.Lexapro sales were $596.1 million in the latest quarter compared with $569.3 million a year ago. Sales of Namenda rose 8.6 percent to $336.8 million.The company said it still expects earnings per share for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012 will be in the range of $3.60-$3.70 a share.Analysts are expecting full-year earnings of $3.76 a share excluding items, and full-year revenue of $4.49 billion.

The research firm, which focuses on financial services, conducted the survey in March, well before the recent RIM outage which left large pockets of BlackBerry users around the world without access to email and other functions.The study found that using mobile devices was increasingly important to advisers, many of whom service clients with hand-held devices who have access to online brokerage services.Nearly half the advisers surveyed said having access to business applications was an “important” or “very important” part of their technology strategy for 2011.

Earlier, an Australian court slapped an interim injunction on the sale of Samsung’s latest computer tablet, handing rival Apple another legal victory in the two firms’ global patent war.

The EU’s executive proposed on Wednesday making farm subsidies fairer and more environmentally friendly, in a bid to win support for keeping EU agricultural spending at about 55 billion euro-a-year ($75 billion-a-year) up to 2020.

The EU’s executive proposed on Wednesday making farm subsidies fairer and more environmentally friendly, in a bid to win support for keeping EU agricultural spending at about 55 billion euro-a-year ($75 billion-a-year) up to 2020.