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THE SWISS new issue market has roared into life with two more successful offerings following last week's deal for Sudelektra, the first corporate stock offering of the year. Credit Suisse First Boston this week completed the flotation of chocolate producer Barry Callebaut, selling 1.43m ordinary shares at Sfr310, having indicated a range to investors of Sfr300 to Sfr340.

SUSTAINED losses over the past couple of weeks on Wall Street have made observers nervous of a possible correction, but some investors are looking at the recent dive in stocks as an incentive to buy at cheaper prices. Although several deals have been postponed, many more are surviving the turmoil and the pipeline for new issues remains busy.

TETLEY, the world's second largest producer of tea-bags, shocked the equity markets this week by dropping its planned flotation just a few weeks after the proposal was announced and SBC Warburg Dillon Read was appointed for a transaction expected to value the company at £400m. The company's management was disappointed by the likely price of the flotation and believed the stockmarket would undervalue the group, which was acquired from Allied Donecq three years ago in a £180m management buy-out.

JP MORGAN and Mediobanca will at the end of this week conclude the sale of stock in Snia, the fibres, chemicals and biomedical company in a deal that will make it into one of the few Italian companies with a large free float. Whereas most Italian companies have retained control when they have floated their subsidiaries, Snia's parent Fiat is cutting its stake from 43.9% to around 6% through the deal while the stake of another major shareholder, Mediobanca, will fall from 9.9% to around 1%.

* The number of flotations by privately owned Italian companies is picking up steam, with SBC Warburg Dillon Read this week pricing its offering of shares in Beghelli, a manufacturer of consumer electronics safety devices. The issue has broken all records with the volume of subscriptions reaching $2.8bn for a company whose sales last year were just Lit172bn. The 17.5m share retail tranche was 27 times oversubscribed while the institutional tranche was 16.5 times oversubscribed. Only the flotations of Telecom Italia and the third sale of stock in Eni have attracted greater interest from Italian retail.

LEAD managers CSFB and IMI have launched the sale of stock in Eni, the fourth government divestment in the Italian oil and gas group attempted in the last three years. The authorities will slim their current shareholding of around 51% of the company to 38% through the sale of 1bn common shares. After one week of bookbuilding the Italian state and its bankers have indicated the tranche sizes. It revealed that some 750m shares are to be targeted at local retail investors, 90m will go to Italian institutions, 65m to US institutions, 55m to UK buyers and 40m to accounts in the rest of the world. The deal also has a 97.5m greenshoe option.

GOLDMAN Sachs, ABN Amro Rothschild and BPI this week launched the Esc450bn ($2.45bn) sale of stock in Electricidade de Portugal (EdP), the Portuguese electricity utility that was floated last year. The government, which is selling 120m ordinary shares to cut its stake from 70% to 52%, is hoping for a repetition of the success of the IPO.

LEAD manager Goldman Sachs has launched one of the most important sales of stock yet to emerge from the Turkish market with the $258m share sale of Koç, one of the country's most important conglomerates. The Istanbul market has for some years failed to provide international investors with large, liquid deals from the wide variety of top class companies which exist in Turkey, a gap the long-awaited sale of shares in Koç will more than remedy that.

THE LONG awaited and much discussed flotation for Goldman Sachs, one of the oldest and most successful investment banks in the US, became a reality this week. Following a meeting of the ruling executive committee over the weekend, and support from the bank's partners, the bank announced on Monday its decision to go ahead with the initial public offering, which will involve the sale of up to 15% of its equity.

TWO OF the largest deals of 1998 are set to hit the French equity market in the next few days. This weekend, CSFB and Goldman Sachs will price the sale of shares in Alstom, the Anglo-French engineering group, with the sale of stock in speciality group Rhodia set to follow immediately after. Momentum for the Alstom deal has been building in the last few weeks with international and local French investors showing strong interest in the stock.

MERRILL Lynch is defying investors' fears about the emerging markets as well as harsh conditions in hi-tech industries to bring a deal for a company with some exposure to both sectors. The two tranche straight equity and convertible transaction is for Global Telesystems (GTS), a telecoms group with operations in Europe including central Europe and Russia.

THE FINNISH government plans to float off part of the equity capital in Finnair, expanding the list of assets which will be put up for sale in the coming year. The government holds 58% of the stock. This ownership level is likely to fall to around 40% through the sale of the carrier's stock to international investors. The state is asking international and local investment banks to pitch for the role of adviser and global co-ordinator on the deal, which may appear in the markets by the fourth quarter of this year or early in 1999.