(new: price, votes and details)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - An optimistic study by bank Morgan Stanley drove Symrise shares on Thursday. They gained 2.5 percent to 93.20 euros shortly after the start of trading. This meant one of the front places in the Dax.

Analyst Lisa De Neve became more confident in a study and raised her price target from 97 to 109 euros. She thus sees room for improvement in the medium term and upgraded Symrise shares by two notches from "underweight" to "overweight". Morgan Stanley had not given the shares this positive vote since at least the spring of 2020.

The burdensome destocking in the consumer goods sector - an important customer group for manufacturers of fragrances and flavors - is likely to be coming to an end, although there is still no noticeable recovery in consumer demand, the expert wrote in a study.

In this environment, she is focusing on companies that are well positioned for the long term. Symrise is now one of her favorites, as the Dax group has better prospects than its competitors in view of the brightening environment in the pet food sector and improving profitability.

On the other hand, De Neve downgraded the shares of competitor IFF from "Overweight" to "Equal-weight". She pointed to a rather high debt ratio of the U.S. group as well as limited predictability of business development.

Symrise was a darling of investors for years thanks to strong growth. The share price peaked at just under 133 euros at the end of 2021 - an increase of almost 700 percent compared to the start of the stock market in 2006. Since then, however, it has been going downhill: by around a quarter in 2022, and by almost eleven percent so far in 2023. This makes Lower Saxony one of the biggest losers in the Dax this year, which has gained just under 13 percent.

At the same time, the share price pressure had increased at the beginning of August following a somewhat more restrained company outlook for profit development in the current year. The fact that Symrise CEO Heinz-Jürgen Bertram stuck to his target of increasing sales by 5 to 7 percent in 2023 through his own efforts, i.e. excluding exchange rate effects and acquisitions and disposals of parts of the company, did not convince investors.

Although Symrise is still delivering industry-leading growth, its half-year results showed that even its pet food additives business, which is actually particularly strong, is not immune to the consequences of customers reducing their inventories, analyst Charlie Bentley from investment firm Jefferies noted at the beginning of August. However, according to the current study by Morgan Stanley, there are now signs of improvement here in particular./mis/nas/jha/