Locally, market leader Fisher and Paykel Healthcare (FPH) dropped $1.02 or 2.8% to $35.45, on turnover worth $14.7 million.
Salt Funds managing director Matt Goodson said the decline in FPH looked to be driven by investment flows rather than any concerns about the changing face of America’s tariff regime, which has dogged the stock in the past.
“It may be part of a massive Australian sell portfolio that’s been doing the rounds for a couple of weeks,” Goodson said.
The talk of the day was Eroad, which specialises in technology used for the electronic automation of systems for collecting road user (RUC) charges, among other things.
The stock dropped by $1.00 or 34.7% to $1.88 after making a number of announcements, among them being the departure of co-chief executive David Kenneson.
Eroad said it would shift its focus towards Australia and New Zealand away from a “challenging” North American market.
The company said it expects to record an impairment to carrying value of intangible assets relating to the North American region of up to $150m.
Goodson said growth-oriented money had gone into Eroad on its journey from 91c in May this year to $2.90 this week.
“But now it’s going the other way.”
The company said North America remained an important market for Eroad “however due to a variety of market conditions elongating enterprise sales cycles, growth activity in the region has not delivered within expected timeframes”.
Robotics firm Scott Technology, which rallied sharply this week after securing $44m in new contracts in the US and Brazil, returned to earth - dropping 40c to $2.54.
Takeover target, manuka honey exporter Comvita fell 4c to 75.5c.
A company called Florenz has put together a scheme of arrangement for the manuka honey exporter at 80c/share.
Comvita said it had become aware of media reports to the effect that its founder, Alan Bougen, was representing a syndicate of shareholders who want to veto the scheme.
But Comvita said no information on the supposed veto had been forthcoming.
“Clearly one of the parties isn’t particularly happy with the bid,” Goodson said.
“The [manuka honey] industry is a bit more optimistic than the current harsh reality, which is that there is a vast surplus of honey,” Goodson said.
“What we’ve seen in the past is that when the returns are good, you can get those returns for a period of time, but then there’s just an absolute torrent of new entry.”
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