Deutsche Bank cuts price target on Reckitt Benckiser

Analysts at Deutsche Bank lowered their target price on multinational consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser from 6,500.0p to 6,250.0p on Monday.

Deutsche Bank stated it expects further uncertainty over the level of share loss to Abbott in the US infant formula market and thinks downside risks in the cough, cold and flu market will hold back valuation.

The German bank said it was "very difficult" to re-rate these high gross margin businesses currently but updated its factory activity trackers for both Abbott and Reckitt, which imply share loss and a "modest" de-rating.

" We make some updates to our Reckitt forecasts ahead of the company's Q1 trading update on 26 April. Our FY 23E like-for-like growth edges up from 2.6% to 3.0% and we leave our FY 24E like-for-like growth at 3.8%," said DB.

"We leave our FY 23E margin at 23.4% and our FY 24E margin at 24.0%. We forecast Q1 like-for-like growth of 5.1%. After the the impact of FX, we see our net FY 23E earnings per share declining by -1.3% to 333p and our FY 24E EPS falls by -1.8% to 359.0p."

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com