Broker tips: Wood Group, ITV, AstraZeneca

Wood Group shares fell after Goldman Sachs downgraded the company from ‘neutral’ to ‘sell’ and cut its target price from 639.6p to 517.6p.

In a note on Monday, the investment bank focused on working capital analysis, which it believed would be the key there for the oil services sector this year.

“As low oil prices lead to negative free cash flow generation for oil producers, we believe oil services companies will face delayed payments that they will largely have to accept given the high competition for new orders created by a lack of order intake in the industry.”

Shares in ITV fell sharply on Monday as Deutsche Bank said the broadcaster was lagging the rest of the sector, which has kicked off the year strongly.

Deutsche, which hosted a conference call for investors with four UK media buyers and two advertising forecasters, said: “1Q consensus for the UK TV market was +5% to 6%. A number of forecasts had been cut recently on weakening retail spend; supermarkets and DIY particularly cited. ITV was seen up 2-3% underlying, underperforming the market with C4 particularly strong.”

The bank also pointed out that the inclusion of ITV Player for the first time this year was lifting the company’s year-on-year numbers.

“Player ad revs are around 3% of ITV linear TV ad income. So although ITV was seen up +5% to 6.5% on a headline basis, on a like-for-like basis this is 2-3%,” it said.

Still, looking ahead it said full year consensus was not immediately under threat, although risks are skewed to the downside.

HSBC downgraded AstraZeneca to ‘hold’ from ‘buy’ and cut the price target to 4,880p from 4,910p.

It said the company’s full year results last Thursday were solid, slightly ahead of expectations in terms of sales and in line at core earnings per share level.

The bank said declines in off-patent products Nexium and Seroquel XR were as expected, with increased pricing for Crestor offsetting lower volumes. Meanwhile, the diabetes franchise held up well.

However, HSBC pointed out the market responded negatively to guidance of a low to mid-single-digit decline in 2016 sales and core EPS.

HSBC reckoned the selloff in the shares last week was overdone. “However concerns over portfolio strategy and a near-term lack of growth may outweigh the longer-term potential in investors’ minds.”