(Adds detail, company comment, analyst comment, share price)
ZURICH, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Swiss engineering group Sulzer said on Wednesday that new orders in the first nine months of 2003 rose a nominal one percent to 1.482 billion Swiss francs ($1.12 billion), beating analysts' expectations.
In local currencies and adjusted for merger and acquisition activity, orders were seven percent higher, the firm said, adding it expected order intake for the full-year to exceed last year's levels.
"Further stabilisation of the market situation increasingly indicates an economy upswing -- even if only modest," Sulzer said in a statement, noting that Asian markets were developing positively while North America was still slow.
Shares in the company, which have risen some 56 percent this year, were up 0.7 percent at 295 Swiss francs by 0825 GMT. The stock was dropped from the blue-chip Swiss Market Index earlier this month.
"A better than expected order intake as well as the announcement to shift production units to China in order to save costs are good reasons to keep positions," Aargauer Kantonalbank analyst Christian Stuessi said in a note.
A media report on Tuesday said Sulzer was considering consolidating its pumps division, possibly shifting production to Asia.
"We have quite a few factories in the pumps divison worldwide and we are looking into optimising these factories," Sulzer spokesman Markus Niederhaeuser told Reuters on Wednesday.
"It is possible that certain units or products may go to Asia, but no decisions have been made yet," he added.
Orders in Sulzer's core divisions, adjusted for currencies and merger and acquisition activity, rose eight percent in the nine months to 1.46 billion francs. Third-quarter orders rose a nominal 13 percent.
Analysts had expected Sulzer to book group orders between 1.43 billion and 1.45 billion francs, while orders in the core sections were seen between 1.40 billion and 1.43 billion francs.
Sulzer did not detail earnings for the period. The firm reported a net profit of 83 million francs on sales of 1.946 billion francs for the full-year 2002.