![]()
- White House Plans to Freeze Spending to Cut Deficit
- Week Ahead: Investors Go for Quality, Assess Recovery
- Hedge Fund Billionaire Paulson Reports New Citi Stake
- Cramer: 5 Earnings Reports to Watch Next Week
- Court Rejects 'Clawbacks' for Alleged Stanford Victims
- Cities With the Most Home Price Reductions
- Tax Credit Sparking First-Time Home Sales: Realtors
- Investors Cut Back US Stocks for Bigger Growth Abroad
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- U.S. Stocks Rally for the Second Straight Week
- Dollar is Not Plunging—So 'Calm Down': Market Strategist
- Strategists Say Markets Have More Upside — But How Much?
- Hirschhorn: Risk-Averse Traders
- Roginsky: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Financial Reform
- This Year's Biggest Thanksgiving Leftover: Cash
- TV Series Inks Unique Deal For Fight
- First Time Buyers Rescue Housing: Realtors
- Dollar General Trades Higher After Its IPO
MOST SHARED
- Today's Market Action
- CNBC Video: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping American Great
- Has Twitter's Finest Hours (Seconds) Come and Gone?
- Microsoft's Bill Gates Praises Apple's Steve Jobs For 'Saving the Company'
- CNBC TRANSCRIPT: Warren Buffett & Bill Gates - Keeping America Great
- Israel Going Green
- China's Role as Lender Alters Dynamics for United States
- Low Interest Rate Investing
- Inside Wal-Mart's Acai Berry Juice Maker
Swiss-based Roche said it was cutting production of influenza drug Tamiflu, seen as one of the best defences against a possible bird flu pandemic, because supply now exceeds demand.
The pharmaceutical group said it had increased capacity to more than 400 million treatments a year and that supply now significantly outstrips orders with signs of slowing sales to governments wanting to prepare for any outbreak.
The cutback would not affect Roche's expectations for sales of Tamiflu for stockpiling, at between 800 million Swiss francs ($665 million) to 1.2 billion francs ($1 billion) in 2007, said William Burns, head of the company's pharmaceuticals unit.
"Our guidance for the year is unchanged," Burns told reporters. "This is not a new signal on the sales outlook for Tamiflu."
Roche said the expansion of capacity meant it could now satisfy "significant additional orders" from governments and companies for Tamiflu.
Roche certificates, its most widely traded form of equity, were 0.5% lower at 232.30 francs in late trading.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and some countries have been stockpiling the drug in case the H5N1 bird flu strain, now mainly affecting poultry, mutates and begins to spread quickly among humans.
Roche will maintain its stock of intermediates and active pharmaceutical ingredients, so it would be ready to gear up to full production capacity if needed.
Sales to governments in the first quarter were slower than in the previous three months and Eugene Tierney, head of specialist sales at Roche's drugs unit, said that was the first indication of a tail off in government orders and demand.
The Basel-based company has so far received orders from governments amounting to about 215 million treatments.
- Warren Buffett and Bill Gates spoke to Columbia students, and Buffett made the students a startling offer.
- For the chief of cable company Comcast, growth has been about making deals – generally very large deals.
- Some companies may start using insurance to shift carbon risk from their balance sheets to maybe... yours?
- The president and founder of Genesis Today wants to improve America’s health, and thinks Wal-Mart can help.
- Switzerland's privacy watchdog is taking legal action to force Google to make changes to its Street View service.
- A wealthy, distracted Texas driver crashed his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron sports car into a salt marsh, say police.












