Company briefs - 2010-04-14

The Russian pharmaceuticals company Farmstandart has become an 11.3 percent shareholder in Latvian pharmaceutical company Grindeks, reports Nozare.lv. Vitalijs Gavrilovs, who with his 11.3 percent stake has until now been one of the largest shareholders in Grindeks, sold his shares to Farmstandart. The sale price hasn’t been announced for this closed door deal. Chairman Janis Romanovskis indicated that Farmstandart is the market leader in the Russian pharmaceutical industry, and since 2008 has been one of the most significant cooperation partners for Grindex as the distributor of the product Mildronate on the Russian market. Grindeks net profit for 2009 totaled 3.7 million lats (5.2 million euros), a 58.9 percent drop from 2008, with revenue down 13.7 percent to 53.6 million lats.

In comparison to the first quarter of last year, the number of passengers traveling through the Port of Tallinn during the first three months of 2010 was 6.1 percent higher, reports Aripaev Online. While in the first quarter of 2009, the Port of Tallinn was used by 1,369,000 passengers, this year the number was 1,453,100. Among the routes with the greatest increase in traffic was the Tallinn-Helsinki route, up from 1,167,000 to 1,250,700, or 7.2 per cent. The number of passengers on the route Tallinn-Stockholm fell by 1.8 percent, from 194,500 to 191,100. The number of vessels visiting the Port of Tallinn fell by 6.2 per cent in the year-on-year comparison, from 1,699 in the first quarter of 2009 to 1,594.