OSLO, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Shares in Norwegian tyre pressure gauge maker Sensonor fell to a record low on Thursday after it gave up a planned strategic partnership with an unnamed group and said it was considering a share issue.
Sensonor shares closed down 23.5 percent at 1.53 Norwegian crowns ($0.222) on the Oslo bourse, just above a session low of 1.51 and eclipsing a previous low of 1.61 on December 30.
Sensonor said that it was dropping a planned partnership with an unidentified company, saying that Sensonor had decided that it would be better off working to fill existing orders.
It also said that an "important factor" in abandoning the planned link-up was that its main creditor demanded a 70 million crown payment as part of the transaction.
And the group, whose capitalisation was 212 million crowns at Thursday's close, also said that it might need to raise cash. Sensonor shares were worth more than 70 crowns in early 1997.
"Getting in an investor will clearly be a goal," managing director Rolf Leistad told Reuters. "I think it would be right to have a directed share issue before the summer."
Traders said that the share price slide began on news of the collapse of the planned partnership and accelerated on worries that a share issue would further dilute the stock.
Sensonor gave bright forecasts, saying that existing orders totalled about 3.0 billion crowns. But it did not say how long its horizon for those orders was.
It also forecast a "considerable rise" in coming years because of new U.S. laws demanding gauges in vehicles to indicate tyre pressure.
It forecast that its turnover had the potential to rise to at least 500 million crowns in 2005 from 250 million in 2004, more than 100 million in 2003 and 30 million in 2002.
Sensonor designs and makes sensors used in cars and based on what it calls silicon micromechanical technology. Apart from tyre gauges, Sensonor says it supplied more than 45 million crash sensors for air-bags in cars, mostly in the 1990s.