LONDON (ShareCast) - The selling pressure on the UK chemical sector continued on Friday on negative readacross from a profit warning by US giant DuPont, one of the largest chemical companies in the world.

The UK chemical sector was down around 0.6% this afternoon and has now fallen 10% over the past month.

DuPont declined in pre-market trading on Wall Street after cutting its earnings guidance for the full year on the back of second-quarter weakness in its agriculture business.

The company took worse-than-estimated write-downs during the quarter on unsold corn seed as it saw higher North American sales volumes of soybean than expected.

London-listed chemical groups such as Johnson Matthey, Synthomer, Elementis and Alent were all trading in the red today.

Croda, down 0.3%, was continuing to fall after dampening sentiment in the sector with its own profit warning on Tuesday.

The company, which works in the consumer care, performance technologies and industrial chemicals markets, said it expects second quarter pre-tax profits to be around 8% below those of the first quarter due to weakness in Industrial Chemicals and adverse currency movements. It had previously expected profits to be flat on the preceding three months.

Meanwhile, gas-to-liquid (GTL) developer Velocys was also trading in the red after announcing on Wednesday the acquisition of Pinto Energy which is aimed at expanding its GTL position in North America. The stock was down 1% today.

Top performing sectors so far today
Household Goods & Home Construction 11,622.30 +1.53%
Aerospace and Defence 4,968.85 +1.13%
Industrial Metals & Mining 1,139.39 +1.13%
Mobile Telecommunications 4,439.74 +0.84%
Personal Goods 23,309.61 +0.72%

Bottom performing sectors so far today
Forestry & Paper 11,536.12 -1.02%
Chemicals 10,023.68 -0.63%
Automobiles & Parts 8,592.39 -0.51%
Electricity 9,885.18 -0.41%
General Industrials 4,212.69 -0.41%

BC

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