UK stock preview: Morrisons, Ryanair, AstraZeneca

• Morrisons share price fell 3.77% on Monday morning (04 October 2021), following reports that it will be acquired by a US private equity group
• Ryanair share price rose 2.4% despite a dip in passenger traffic in September 2021
• AstraZeneca share price inches up 1.2% in early trading, after one of its regimens was granted the Breakthrough Therapy Designation
• Keen to take advantage of rising and falling share prices? Open an account with us to long or short these stocks now.

Morrisons (LON: MRW)

Morrisons, the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain, is poised to be acquired by US private equity group Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R).

It was reported that CD&R has won a bid auction for the supermarket group with a £7 billion (US$9.5 billion) offer.

CD&R had offered 287p per ordinary share, versus rival Fortress’ 286p per share bid.

Morrisons board of directors will now present the offer to shareholders at a meeting scheduled for 19 October.

If the bid is approved by shareholders, CD&R will officially take over Morrisons by November.

Ryanair (LON: RYA)

Ryanair said its traffic hit 10.6 million passengers in September 2021 on the back of 69,500 flights, which more than doubled September 2020’s 5.2 million passengers.

This equates to a load factor of 81% versus a load factor of 71% of a year ago.

However, this is slightly down from August 2021’s load factor of 82% and traffic of 11.1 million passengers.

AstraZeneca (LON: AZN)

AstraZeneca’s Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan) has been granted the Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of adult patients with unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive breast.

Enhertu is a HER2-directed antibody drug conjugate (ADC) jointly developed by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo Company.

The regimen has been approved for adult patients who have received two or more prior anti-HER2-based regimens in the metastatic setting in the US, Japan, the EU and several other countries, based on the results from the DESTINY-Breast01 trial.

Susan Galbraith, Executive Vice President, Oncology R&D, AstraZeneca, said: ‘This is an important step in bringing Enhertu as a potential new option in earlier lines of treatment for HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer, given the urgent need to improve outcomes.’

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