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B R E A K F A S T W I T H T H E F O O L Monday, October 9, 2000 benjamin.rogers@enron.com _________________________________________________________________ REGISTER TO BECOME A FOOL -- GET FREE STUFF! http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147833 _________________________________________________________________ Sponsored By: InvestorPlace.com There are 5 tech stocks every investor must own. Tech expert Michael Murphy reveals their names--and the best strategy for buying them today--in his JUST-RELEASED FREE REPORT: http://www.lnksrv.com/m.asp?i=147834 "Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does." -- Jane Austen SMITHKLINE TO BUY BLOCK DRUG The big British drug maker bolsters its consumer business. By Tom Jacobs British-based drug producer SmithKline Beecham (NYSE: SBH) announced today that it would swallow New Jersey's oral products maker Block Drug (Nasdaq: BLOCA) for $1.24 billion. SmithKline will pay $53 a share for Block, which closed Friday at $50.63, up 0.75%. SmithKline ended the week at $67.44, a mere 5% under its 52-week high. SmithKline is expanding its consumer business while competitors such as Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) are shedding theirs to focus on drugs. SmithKline already earns one-third of its revenues from consumer products, which include Aquafresh toothpaste, and now adds Block's Sensodyne toothpaste and Polident denture cleaner brands. Commentators speculate that SmithKline is keeping a consumer division to better deliver non-prescription versions of its own drugs that have lost patent protection, or that the Block buyout better positions SmithKline to spin off its consumer division. At the same time, the British drug powerhouse is pushing into genomics: It has joined a new public-private consortium to fund efforts to decode mouse DNA within the next six months. The $53 million Mouse Sequencing Consortium includes SmithKline, Affymetrix (Nasdaq: AFFX), the Merck Genome Research Institute, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the British-based Wellcome Trust. Like its sibling the SNP Consortium, the Mouse confab hopes to speed genomic data into the public domain. Celera Genomics (NYSE: CRA) and other companies are competing to sequence the mouse genome and SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) to sell in proprietary databases. http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147835 Surrounding these events is the pending merger of SmithKline with larger drug maker Glaxo Wellcome (NYSE: GLX). The two await regulatory approval to create the world's second-largest pharmaceutical firm with a $180 billion market cap. Perhaps because of their experience -- the Federal Trade Commission has delayed the merger twice and now won't rule until the end of the year -- SmithKline hasn't announced a target date to close the Block deal. _________________________________________________________________ NEWS TO GO Reuters reports that General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Fiat are joining forces for talks to purchase some or all of ailing South Korean car maker Daewoo. Daewoo Motor is one of 12 units of Daewoo Group, which creditors rescued in August and seek to shore up. Ford beat out GM in June for exclusive talks with Daewoo, but Ford ended negotiations in September. GM and Daewoo Motors have been around the block before -- several times. Their 15-year alliance ended in 1992. City delivery speedsters Kozmo.com and Urbanfetch.com are talking a Kozmo buyout again, according to The New York Times. Kozmo has not been the most ardent suitor: It sued Urbanfetch before it opened last year and settled out of court. The parties have bailed from previous talks at the last minute. The Times' sources state that the new company would hope to go public in the next year -- if the Internet IPO market turns up. Facing tomorrow's announcement of latest quarter earnings, biotech drug maker Biogen (Nasdaq: BGEN) licensed five new drug targets from genomics drug discovery company CuraGen (Nasdaq: CRGN). Biogen has been criticized for the weakness of its drug development pipeline, and the CuraGen deal gives Biogen a jump start at the early stages of the pipeline -- five targets against which to test possible drug candidates. Biogen also announced a management realignment Friday. A new gene bank, the First Genetic Trust, will open to allay people's reluctance to share their genetic data with researchers. Arthur Holden, chair of the SNP Consortium and Mouse Consortium (see lead story above), will form the bank with David Wang, former head of genomics and bioinformatics at Motorola (NYSE: MOT), and Andrea Califano, former computational biology director at IBM (NYSE: IBM). The bank would perform two main functions designed to keep individual information private, assuage fears that information could be used to deny employment or insurance, and increase efficiency. The bank would provide analysis results to researchers, but not the individual genetic data, and patients could authorize the bank to give their doctors access to a patient's DNA account for prescription purposes instead of having to test patients each time. http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147836 Enjoy Friday's Foolish market wrap-up with one swift click! http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147837 _________________________________________________________________ EDITOR'S PICK Your favorite stock takes a nosedive and you want to sell it, take a tax loss, and buy it back at the lower price. Enter Roy Lewis to warn you of wash sale rules. http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147838 _______________________________________________________________ -News & Commentary http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147839 -Fool Community http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147840 -Post of the Day http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147841 -Latest Fribble http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147842 -Latest Market Numbers http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147843 ____________________________________________________________ My Portfolio: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147844 My Discussion Boards: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147845 My Fool: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147846 Fool.com Home: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147847 My E-Mail Settings: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147848 Sponsored By: InvestorPlace.com There are 5 tech stocks every investor must own. Tech expert Michael Murphy reveals their names--and the best strategy for buying them today--in his JUST-RELEASED FREE REPORT: http://www.lnksrv.com/m.asp?i=147849 ARE YOU INTERESTED IN BIOTECH STOCKS? Enroll in our biotech investing online seminar and learn from experts. 100% money-back guarantee. http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147850 BECOME A FOOL! Get a FREE Investing Guide and more... http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147851 FOOL DIRECT E-MAIL SERVICES Need to change your address or unsubscribe? You can also temporarily suspend mail delivery. Click here: http://www.fool.com/community/freemail/freemaillogin.asp?email=benjamin.rogers @enron.com< Have ideas about how we can improve the Fool Direct or new e-mail products you'd like to see? Try our discussion board: http://www.fool.com/m.asp?i=147852 ____________________________________________________ © Copyright 2000, The Motley Fool. All rights reserved. This material is for personal use only. Republication and redissemination, including posting to news groups, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of The Motley Fool. . MsgId: msg-8562-B10969313Address.msg-08:53:16(10-09-2000) X-Version: mailer-sender-master,v 1.84 X-Version: mailer-sender-daemon,v 1.84 Message-Recipient: benjamin.rogers@enron.com
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