In the process, Melanozyme is combined with a bio-activator to diminish the dark colored pigment in the skin. The use of Melanozyme eliminates side effects such as skin redness and burning sensation which are seen in the case of other skin whitening products available in the market.

It has been estimated that skin whitening is one of the fastest growing segments of the global beauty industry. The global whitening market is expected to grow over 10% annually. In particular, the Asian market is estimated to be roughly $18 billion per annum in size and is expected to grow rapidly.   

Headquartered in Yokneam Illit, Israel, Syneron Medical was founded in 2000 and is engaged in the design, development, and marketing of aesthetic medical products based on its proprietary electro-optical synergy (ELOS) technology. Its medical aesthetic devices are powered by proprietary software, and use the combined-energy technology of bi-polar radio frequency (RF) and optical energy (laser or non-coherent light).

Noble has a strong balance sheet with sufficient liquidity and financial flexibility. Management maintains a disciplined investment approach. They have been sensibly allocating resources to long-term development projects, which are vital for its future growth and to living within generated cash flows.

Going forward, the ongoing major development projects in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, Equatorial Guinea and Israel will create substantial value for Noble shareholders. However, the present unfavorable macro backdrop remains a concern and might overshadow the positives, at least in the near term.

We expect Noble shares to perform in line with its large E&P peers in the absence of near-term catalysts. As such, we maintain our Neutral recommendation for the company.

It will now be possible for Siemens to build Israel’s first commercial solar farm in the region between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. The company will handle project management including engineering and construction of the photovoltaic plants. It has signed a framework agreement to build plants with a total output of 40 megawatts (MW). The first project will be construction of a plant with an output of up to 4.9 MW at Kibbutz Ketura, in the southern desert of Israel.

Areva Power was founded in 2006 and is headquartered at Kibbutz Ketura/Eilat. This subsidiary of Global Sun Power Ltd. has 20 employees. The equity investment in Areva is aimed at strengthening the Siemens’ environmental portfolio. Last year, Siemens’ environmental technologies generated sales of 19 billion Euros, roughly one-fourth of the company’s total revenue.

By 2010, Siemens plans to increase the share of environmental technologies to around 25 billion Euros. It is investing in Areva through its equity investment company Siemens Project Ventures GmbH (SPV).

Together with its partners, SPV has been involved worldwide in the development of infrastructure projects, particularly in the energy, transport and telecommunication sectors. SPV is a Group company of Siemens Financial Services GmbH (SFS), an international provider of financial solutions in the business-to-business area.

Major competitors of Siemens include ABB Ltd. (ABB) and General Electric Co. (GE). We currently have a Neutral Recommendation on the stock.

The third emerging markets sector exchange-traded funds launched on Wednesday, this time adding top stocks from a composite index of 10 sectors spanning 15 countries.

The name of the new ETF is a mouthful – the Emerging Global Shares Dow Jones Emerging Markets Titans Composite Index Fund (NYSE Arca: EEG).  Its sponsor is Emerging Global Advisors, which is responsible for coming to market in May with the first sector-focused emerging markets ETFs so far.

Those are: the Emerging Global Shares Dow Jones Emerging Markets Energy Fund (NYSE Arca: EEO); and the Emerging Global Shares Dow Jones Emerging Markets Metals & Mining Titans Index Fund (NYSE Arca: EMT).  You can read more about those ETFs here.

EEG is designed to track the Dow Jones Emerging Markets Titans Composite Index. That benchmark includes the 100 top names by market capitalization sizes in major sectors across the developing marketplace. The sector weightings are modified in that no one name can have more than a 10% exposure in the fund.

The ETF will charge an annual expense ratio of 0.75%.

EEG differs in both its geographical complexion as well as its sector exposures in several subtle, yet possibly significant ways, from broader-based emerging markets ETFs.  For example, take the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets Index (NYSE: EEM). It has roughly the same in financials (23.89%) as EEG’s benchmark had at the end of the second quarter (22.35%).

But financials are the second-biggest sector in EEG, whereas it’s No. 1 in EEM. Oil and gas was the Dow Jones index’s largest sector weighting at slightly more than 29% (again, through June).  EEM has less than 16% in energy right now.

“Since we don’t include Taiwan, Korea and Israel – we don’t consider them emerging markets – our fund will have a little bit more exposure to the BRICs. That means we’ll have less in areas like telecom and a little more in resource-related sectors,” said Richard Kang, EGA’s research director.

Kang and the firm’s chief executive, Bob Holderith, discussed in detail how a composite sector emerging markets ETF might work – along with the company’s other plans to launch 10-plus related sector ETFs – in this Q&A story which ran at IndexUniverse.com in June.)

Entering the third quarter, the underlying benchmark for EEG had the following country makeup:

• China Offshore: 20.43%

• Brazil: 20.29%

• India : 18.15%

• Russia: 14.24%

• Mexico: 10.07%

• South Africa: 8.30%

• Chile: 2.74%

• Malaysia: 1.85%

• Indonesia: 1.53%

• Kuwait: 1.04%

The fund’s sector weightings of its underlying benchmark showed the following breakdown:

• Oil & Gas: 29.02%

• Financials: 22.35%

• Basic Materials: 11.36%

• Telecommunications: 10.70%

• Industrials: 5.55%

• Consumer Goods: 5.20%

• Technology: 4.93%

• Consumer Services: 4.80%

• Utilities: 4.25%

• Health Care: 1.84%

Mylan Inc. (MYL) entered into a strategic partnership with Biocon Ltd to expand into the area of biotechnology. Biocon has a strong portfolio of biopharmaceutical drugs that include insulin, erythropoietin and monoclonal antibodies. The collaboration will help both companies to develop, manufacture and commercialize generic biotech medicines without duplicating associated costs. The deal mainly focuses on monoclonal antibodies used to treat diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.

Mylan develops, manufactures, markets, licenses, and distributes generic, branded, and branded generic pharmaceutical products, as well as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). In order to expand its product line, Mylan has been pretty active in forming strategic alliances with pharmaceutical companies to develop products or to launch distribution and licensing arrangements. After the acquisition of Merck Generics and Matrix Labs, Mylan is now the third-largest generic company in the world.

Mylan has a robust generic product pipeline and the total U.S. generic product portfolio consists of approximately 204 products. As per estimates, $25 billion worth of biologics are due to de-patent by 2016, which throws open a huge market for the generic player. The company intends to focus its development on generic products with significant sales in areas that offer substantial opportunities and other competitive advantages. Mylan is not alone in the race for strategic partnerships, Teva Pharmaceutical (TEVA), the Israel-based largest generic drug company is also eyeing suitable acquisitions.

With Matrix and Merck Generics, Mylan should be able to position itself as a leader in the worldwide generics market. The strategic initiatives undertaken by the company in the recent past should aid long-term growth. Mylan currently has almost $453 million in cash and equivalents and access to $750 million committed revolving credit facility. These funds should be sufficient to meet the company's medium-term requirements. We maintain our Hold rating on the stock.

Phase III Development of Laquinimod Progressing - Patient Enrolment Completed

On June 25, 2009, Teva Pharmaceutical (TEVA) and its development partner, Active Biotech announced that they have finished enrolling patients for a second pivotal phase III clinical study, BRAVO, which is being conducted to evaluate the novel, oral once-daily immunomodulating compound, laquinimod, for the treatment of relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS).

Multiple sclerosis is a nervous system disease that affects the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. BRAVO will study the efficacy, safety and tolerability of laquinimod versus placebo. The trial has also been designed to provide risk-benefit data for laquinimod versus Avonex, a currently available injectable treatment.

The BRAVO study is being conducted with more than 1200 patients at 156 sites across the U.S., Europe, Israel and South Africa. Another phase III study, ALLEGRO, is currently ongoing in North America, Europe and Asia.

The MS market is huge and represents significant commercial potential. The company estimates that more than 400k people are affected by the disease in the U.S. Over 2 million people are estimated to be affected worldwide. Laquinimod enjoys Fast Track status in the U.S. and if all goes well, it could hit the market as soon as late 2011.

Once launched, laquinimod will be competing with products like Biogen Idec's (BIIB) Avonex, Bayer HealthCare's (BAYRY) Betaseron, Pfizer/Serono's (PFE) Rebif, and Biogen Idec/Elan's (BIIB/ELN) Tysabri. As MS is a life-long disease, an oral treatment like laquinimod could find preference over currently existing therapies which need to be injected or infused.

We maintain our Buy recommendation on Teva. The company delivered a strong performance in 2008 despite the global slowdown and we remain optimistic on the company's growth prospects - Teva should continue posting strong revenues and earnings on the back of new product launches, both generic and branded. Long-term growth should be supported by the company's branded and biogenerics pipeline. Meanwhile, the Barr acquisition should help Teva strengthen its position in the U.S. and expand its presence in Europe. We recommend purchase up to the $52 level.

Ness Technologies (NSTC) is a global provider of IT services. The company recently announced a multi-million dollar contract win from Latin American government. Under this contract, Ness will provide Control command and Control system to the Latin American Government.

Although this contract is expected to positively influence the revenue stream of the company going forward, but there is no clear indication about the commencement of cash flow from it. We do not expect this contract win to provide immediate support to the company's downward moving revenue flow.

This apart, Ness faces intense competition from many established firms such as Accenture (ACN), IBM (IBM), Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Wipro (WIT), Cognizant Technology (CTSH), Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), HCL, Electronic Data Systems, GlobalLogic, Virtusa (VRTU), Persistent and Symphony Services, which is making it tough for the company to gain additional market share. The company's high level of exposure to its politically unstable domestic market in Israel is also a cause of concern to us. Research firm IDC, in its recent report forecasts worldwide IT spending to grow at a slower rate of just 0.5% in 2009.

The company continues with its trend of poor results in 1Q09, and once again lowered its FY 2009 guidance due to the global economic slowdown. We believe Ness is facing slow growth and the risk of execution for the company remains intact.

Moreover, choppy equity markets and an uncertain global economy have led to a significant fall in its stock price. We expect the company to post unhealthy results in most of the quarters for 2009. We are a tad apprehensive about the company, and reiterate our Sell rating on the stock.

Right now, in the wake of MSCI’s reclassification of Israel as a developed market, I’m working on a rundown of the country classifications of four major index providers: MSCI, Dow Jones, FTSE and Standard & Poor’s.

The evolution of emerging markets (and sometimes devolution of developed markets—see Greece, which could lose developed-market status in the FTSE indexes) is just particularly fascinating to me. Take some of the frontier/emerging markets that the index providers cover at the very bottom rungs of the investability ladder: Latvia? Slovakia? Trinidad & Tobago? Mauritius?

Frankly, I’m dying to know what the investment stories are behind these tiny, tiny markets. And while I believe frontier markets (like, say, Vietnam) offer some awesome investment opportunities, is anyone really itching to sink some funds into an obscure eastern European country that probably has a smaller population than the number of visitors to my local mall on the day after Christmas?

I realize there are different rules and methodologies that each of the index providers use, but it all seems rather mysterious. For example, Dow Jones—which generally uses the International Monetary Fund’s designations—classifies Slovenia as a developed market, while MSCI has it labeled as a frontier market. That’s quite a disparity.

Lately, the majority of the focus has been on Israel and South Korea, though, and whether they will transition to developed-market status within the various classification systems. MSCI, of course, just promoted Israel to developed status last week, while keeping Korea in the emerging category. Given that the majority of internationally invested funds are benchmarked to MSCI indexes (at least in the U.S.), this issue has been followed fairly closely by investors. At the end of March, Israel was the ninth-largest country in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, with a 4.0% weighting, and South Korea was the fourth-largest, with a 12.4% weighting.

Given the amount of money benchmarked to that index and the even greater amount benchmarked to the MSCI EAFE Index, which Israel now joins, that’s an awful lot of funds shifting around. South Korea is up for reconsideration in 2010 (as is Taiwan, another country straddling the emerging/developed divide).

But MSCI seems to be on the tail end of the trend: Dow Jones, S&P and FTSE all classify South Korea as a developed market, while only Dow Jones and FTSE put Israel into the developed bucket. S&P still has Israel as emerging. Of course, FTSE, S&P and Dow Jones have a lot fewer funds tracking or measured against their global indexes.

They can shift their country classifications with relative ease, as they deem appropriate, without a lot of reverberation. But if MSCI decides to promote a country to developed status, many, many billions of dollars are going to be moving around, with all sorts of economic consequences.

And not all of them will be positive: In Israel, there is concern that the country moving from relatively big-dog status in the emerging markets index to a minor position in the developed markets index will actually result in outflows from the local stock market.

(Read an article on the latest MSCI moves here. Also of interest might be a Bloomberg article on the subject here, and another article from an Israeli publication about a Deutsche Bank study on the potential negative impacts of the switch.)

Teva Pharmaceutical, Israel’s largest company, saw its price spike in June shortly before the official MSCI announcement, but there’s no telling what the longer-term effects will be. It will be interesting to see what happens with that, and even more interesting to compare the outcomes with what happens when South Korea—and its big stock, Samsung Electronics—is finally promoted to developed status.

Yeah, that was definitely the unrepentant nerd talking …

In another reduction of alternative indexes that use different valuations and business fundamentals to weight companies, Claymore Advisors is seeking to switch an existing exchange-traded fund to a more traditional market-cap size weighted benchmark.

But that isn't all.

In a filing dated May 21, the trust for the Claymore/Great Companies Large-Cap Growth ETF (NYSE: XGC) is asking the Securities & Exchange Commission to let it invest in much smaller companies. And while listed largely on U.S. exchanges, they'd be foreign-based businesses.

The new fund would be called the Claymore/BNY Mellon International Small Cap ETF.

The document notes that the new ETF's "investment objective is not fundamental" in nature. It clearly states the change will revert to a strictly passive indexing approach. (See filing here.)

The request to regulators by Claymore comes on the heels of PowerShares' decision to close 19 of its ETFs, a dozen of which were based on fundamental indexes created by Rob Arnott's Research Affiliates. (See related story here.)

While the existing XGC also follows an index, it's based on an investment approach by Great Companies Inc., a Tampa Bay, Fla.-based money management firm. Its managers rank companies by such factors as price-earnings growth rates, or PEG ratios, and various debt measures for assessing profitability.

Great Companies uses computers to crunch fundamental data to compare value characteristics against growth metrics for domestic large-cap names. Stocks are ranked and added to the ETF's underlying index according to the adviser's composite scoring system.

When it was launched in April 2007, XGC came with an expense ratio of 0.60%. It hasn't changed since then and it had slightly more than $3.7 million in assets through Tuesday.

Higher Price Tag 

When it was first coming to market, a Great Companies' portfolio manager acknowledged that XGC's price tag was higher than rival large-cap funds such as Vanguard and iShares. "But we're providing more of a managed-account product than a classic index-fund product," he said in a MarketWatch.com story at the time. (You can read the story here).

The new small-cap international ETF would face stiff competition as several newcomers have jumped into the asset class in the past few years. But one bone of contention for U.S.-based investors in often illiquid foreign waters is that it can be difficult to follow small-cap names held by their funds.

The new Claymore offering would address that concern by predominately investing in overseas firms with listings on major U.S. exchanges. The fund would hold mainly companies with American depositary receipts or global depositary receipts and market caps of $250 million to $2 billion.

At the end of March, such a makeup gave the underlying index a definite slant to emerging markets. The BNY/Mellon benchmark consisted of 92 stocks. The weightings by country then were: Brazil 21.37%; China 19.20%; India 7.28%; United Kingdom 6.88%; Chile 5.59%; Mexico 4.19%; Russia 3.64%; Japan 3.40%; Israel 3.10%; Netherlands 2.78%; Greece 2.64%; South Africa 2.57%; Italy 2.14%; Argentina 1.98%; Switzerland 1.96%; France 1.89%; Korea 1.79%; Australia 1.68%; Ireland 1.61%; Colombia 1.51%; Hungary 1.00%; U.S. 0.82%; Indonesia 0.50%; Hong Kong 0.46%; Denmark 0.45% and Germany 0.41%.

No expense ratio is listed in the filing. But if the new fund were in the same neighborhood as XGC's, it would seem to have a better fighting chance when competing in the small-cap international arena.

Prices for rival ETFs range from around 0.40% and up. For example, the group's granddaddy is the WisdomTree International SmallCap Dividend Fund (NYSE: DLS). Meanwhile, Vanguard entered the field in March with an ETF charging 0.38%. (For a more complete breakdown on competing international small-cap ETFs, see stories here and here.)

-- This report was submitted by IndexUniverse.com's Murray Coleman.