By Sarah Turner, MarketWatch
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- European shares advanced on Tuesday, helped by earnings-related gains for Heineken, Carlsberg and Wolseley.
The pan-European Dow Jones Stoxx 600 index (ST:SXXP 249.27, -0.40, -0.16%) climbed 0.5% to 250.80, up for the sixth time in seven sessions.
Of individual stocks, Heineken (NL:HEIA 35.86, +0.82, +2.34%) shares were up 2.3% and Carlsberg shares rose 4%. Wolseley (UK:WOS 1,611, +162.00, +11.18%) shares surged 10.4%.
Dutch brewer Heineken reported a five-fold rise in net profit for 2009 to 510 million euros ($694 million), against 105 million euros last year, boosted by cost reductions.
Carlsberg's fourth-quarter profit more than tripled to 383 million Danish kroner ($70 million) from 111 million, buoyed by stock building in Russia ahead of excise duty.
Meanwhile, construction materials group Wolseley said that its trading profit before exceptional items is expected to exceed market forecasts for a 326 million pound fiscal-year profit, primarily due to better-than-expected cost efficiencies.
On a regional level, the U.K. FTSE 100 index (UK:UKX 5,368, +15.52, +0.29%) rose 0.7% to 5,388.16, the German DAX index (DX:DAX 5,683, -5.24, -0.09%) advanced 0.7% to 5,725.46 and the French CAC-40 index (FR:PX1 3,764, +6.89, +0.18%) rose 0.8% to 3,785.39.
Asian shares were mostly higher. U.S. stock futures were pointing to mild gains on Wall Street, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures up 36 points.
The euro climbed against the dollar, up 0.6% at $1.3678, and metal futures also climbed, giving miners such as Vedanta Resources (UK:VED 2,610, -19.00, -0.72%) , up 1.3%, a hand.
Still, drug stocks were weak for another session in Europe, this time weighed down by losses from Merck KGaA (DE:MRK 60.18, -4.32, -6.70%) , down 5.9%, and Roche (CH:ROG 180.60, -1.10, -0.61%) (RHHB.Y 42.23, -0.22, -0.52%) , down 1.6%.
Merck KGaA swung to a fourth-quarter net profit of 56.7 million euros, but the figure fell below analyst expectations after taking a provision related to litigation at Merck Serono and for exchange-rate risks in Venezuela.
Roche's Genentech subsidiary said Tuesday that a Phase III study did not meet its primary endpoint of showing that Avastin plus Xeloda or 5-FU and cisplatin chemotherapy could extend the lives of people with inoperable or advanced stomach cancer compared with chemotherapy alone.
Austrian banking group Raiffeisen International saw its shares drop 8.4% after its 2009 net profit fell to 212 million euros, from 982 million euros last year. The lender to Central and Eastern European customers also said it's mulling a merger with its parent Raiffeisen Zentralbank Oesterreich.
Commerzbank (DE:CBK 5.68, -0.25, -4.23%) shares were down 1.5%.
The German banking group narrowed its fourth-quarter net loss of 1.86 billion euros, from 5.45 billion euros posted a year earlier, but the result fell below analyst expectations for a loss of 1.17 billion euros, according to data compiled by Dow Jones Newswires.
