Favored Companies

摘要

Quigley cites Diagnosticos da America, a listed Brazilian chain of medical testing labs known as Dasa. Surprisingly, the sale of US$250 million in 10-year notes attracted US$1.8 billion in demand from international investors. Proceeds of the bond will be used mostly for company expansion, "which has priority through internal growth and acquisitions," Dasa said in a May regulatory filing. The bond sale followed on the heels of the S&P upgrade. Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch were joint bookrunners Petroleo Brasileiro, the state-controlled oil company known as Petrobras, stimulated national pride in Brazil when Bloomberg News calculated that the company's market value had surpassed that of Microsoft and was the sixth-largest company in the world by market cap. Petrobras's shares, though rising sharply in recent years, are still on the buy lists of many analysts quoted widely in Brazil. The shares "still are cheap," says Banco UBS Pactual's Pedro Batista. The Tupi oil field discovery announced by Petrobras last November has from five to eight billion barrels of recoverable petroleum, the company said. A Brazilian regulatory authority said in April that another oil deposit near Tupi, called Carioca, may contain 33 billion barrels of oil, though Petrobras has declined to confirm the estimate.