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Biotech / Medical : PPDI - Pharmaceutical Product Development, Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wesley who wrote (47)	9/15/1999 10:47:00 PM
From: Susan Saline	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71

let's blame it on the the weather ............................ Wednesday September 15, 4:01 pm Eastern Time FOCUS-PPD shares slump after news of key retirement (new throughout, updates share price, adds details and analyst comments, pvs WILMINGTON) By Ransdell Pierson NEW YORK, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Shares of PPD Inc. (Nasdaq:PPDI - news) fell sharply Wednesday after the drug-testing company said its president and chief operating officer, Thomas D'Alonzo, would retire next month and it had no immediate plans to replace him. Shares of the company, which has its headquarters in an Atlantic Coast city in the path of Hurricane Floyd, were off 4-3/16 to 14-11/16, or 22 percent, in afternoon trade. That made PPD the percentage loss leader on the Nasdaq. John Kreger, a drug analyst for William Blair & Co., said he believed shares of PPD had been ''oversold,'' attributing the decline in price to a combination of factors -- including the simultaneous news of D'Alonzo's retirement and the approach of Hurricane Floyd. The Wilmington, N.C., company said D'Alonzo would also retire from his position as a director of the company effective Oct. 5, but would ''continue to perform limited consulting services for PPD after his retirement.'' ''Tom D'Alonzo has played a very important role during his tenure as president and COO of the company,'' said Chief Executive Fred Eshelman, who added that D'Alonzo's duties would be absorbed by other members of senior management. PPD provides contract and consulting research and development services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. As a so-called contract research organization (CRO), it performs clinical trials of experimental drugs for larger drug companies. Operations at PPD are not expected to be disrupted by the powerful storm, PPD spokeswoman Nancy Zeleniak told Reuters, adding that drug trials by PPD's CRO subsidiary, PPD Development Inc., were conducted all over the world and data from the trials are protected. ''It's a global company and operations will continue'' despite Floyd, she said, although company headquarters in Wilmington and Research Triangle Park near Chapel Hill, N.C., had been closed amid the largest evacuation from a hurricane in U.S. history. Zeleniak said PPD's share prices have fallen significantly on previous occasions when hurricanes were headed towards storm-prone Wilmington. William Blair's John Kreger said investors have been seeking more details and reassurance from PPD about its plans after the D'Alonzo news, but have been unable to reach PPD officials. ''We're in an information vacuum because PPD has closed its offices in Wilmington and Research Triangle Park,'' Kreger said. Complicating matters, Kreger said PPD executives were unable to fly out of North Carolina to attend a Bear, Stearns health-care conference being held this week in New York. Kreger said PPD shares were apparently also being hurt by a profit warning issued last week by Covance Inc. (NYSE:CVD -news), a rival CRO. Covance said on Sept. 7 that it expected third-quarter and full 1999 earnings to be below analyst estimates because of revenue shortfalls. To be sure, Kreger said he believed PPD would match Wall Street earnings expectations of 29 cents per diluted share in the third quarter. He said he believed the company would deliver full-year 1999 earnings of $1.12 per share, one cent below the consensus forecast of analysts polled by First Call/Thomson Financial. Zeleniak said D'Alonzo was hired by PPD in 1996 and had been instrumental in helping build the company into an operation with 45 offices in 19 countries. D'Alonzo's hiring coincided with PPD's 1996 acquisition of Applied Bioscience International and that company's subsidiary Pharmaco Intl, a CRO, she said. She said D'Alonzo was ''in his fifties,'' and had been planning his retirement for some time ''in order to do some very different things.''