Europe and China are two of the biggest bugbears for the FTSE 100 (FTSEINDICES: ^FTSE) these days, and bad news from both sent the index of top UK shares down 102 points to 6,202 this morning. Weaker-than-expected Chinese data sent the miners down again, and a growing anti-austerity crisis in Portugal is creating fresh panic across Euroland.
Still, at least the FTSE is nowhere near its 52-week low of 5,478 points yet. But some companies are hitting rock-bottom. Here are three dropping to fresh lows:
Anglo American
Though the latest Chinese weakness has hit the FTSE’s big miners again, at least some of them had been rebounding a little before the latest blow fell. Sadly that’s not the case for Anglo American (LSE: AAL), whose shares dropped to a new 52-week low of 1,216p this morning, before clawing back a little to reach 1,225p.
The shares are now down more than 40% over the year, as Anglo American suffers from its exposure to the iron ore market. But with the shares on a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of under 20 based on full-year forecasts, and with a likely dividend of over 4%, they look over-sold to me — as do pretty much all of our miners.
Cairn Energy
Oil & gas companies are being hit, too, with some of the smaller ones suffering badly. One of them, Cairn Energy (LSE: CNE), was pushed to a new low of 250.7p this morning, and is trading for just a penny more than that as I write — but to put that into perspective, Cairn has dropped by only around 8% since a year ago.
Cairn is forecast to make losses for the next couple of years, although at interim time in May chief executive Simon Thomson did describe the company as having “a balanced portfolio of potentially high growth assets“.
Imagination Technologies
Shares in Imagination Technologies (LSE: IMG) ended on a new closing low of 282.8p yesterday, and are down a bit on that to 279p by late morning today. That comes despite the multimedia chip technologist revealing a 19% rise in overall revenue in June’s full-year update — and that included a 49% rise in royalty revenues.
There’s a rise in earnings per share of more than 30% forecast for the year to April 2014, with a further 21% indicated for the year after. The shares are on a forward P/E of 22, which might seem high, but compared to a multiple of 39 for rival ARM Holdings it looks positively modest.
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> Alan does not own any shares mentioned in this article. The Motley Fool owns shares in Imagination Technologies.
