(new: share price development, further analyst opinion)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Verbio shares slowed the pace of their free fall somewhat on Tuesday morning. After a further lowering of the forecast, the share price had initially slipped by almost ten percent, extending the decline of the biofuel producer's shares to 36 percent in the still young year 2024.

Most recently, they fell by 2.1 percent to 20.78 euros. Analyst Simon Jouck from Hauck & Aufhäuser already considered the peak of the negative news to have been reached in the morning after the renewed profit warning.

On Monday, the SDax company had once again lowered its expectations for the current financial year. The quota prices for ethanol and greenhouse gas reduction (GHG) remained under pressure, it said. As a result, the management now expects higher net debt and lower operating profit than recently.

Verbio had already disappointed investors with its profit forecasts last year. Lower biodiesel prices and high energy and raw material costs caused the company problems. With a loss of almost 51 percent, the shares were the second weakest in the SDax in 2023.

The current profit warning should be seen as a clear indication of how sensitive Verbio's sales model is to market prices and how difficult it is to predict them, even with regulatory support through higher quota requirements, wrote analyst Adrian Pehl from the analyst firm Stifel./ajx/tih