European shares edged higher on Wednesday, with miners gaining as copper remained near record highs on supply concerns, though weak results from engineering firms Atlas Copco and Sandvik weighed. The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index of top shares closed up 0.2 percent at 1,162.39 points, after Tuesday's biggest gain in three weeks.
"Rising commodity prices are continuing to hurt companies. This could be a sign analysts will start to revise forecasts," Koen De Leus, strategist at KBC Securities Bolero in Brussels, said. Sandvik and Atlas Copco fell 3 and 1.6 percent respectively after results missed expectations, with higher raw material costs having an impact. The STOXX Europe 600 Basic Resources gained 2.2 percent and ENRC 3.8 percent after it said ferroalloys production grew in the fourth quarter.
Spain's IBEX 35 gained 0.4 percent, Portugal's PSI 20 was up 0.3 percent and Italy's benchmark rose 0.6 percent. Britain's Imperial Tobacco jumped 5.9 percent after the world's fourth-biggest cigarette maker returned to volume growth in the last quarter of 2010.
On the technical front, the Euro STOXX 50 was up 0.2 percent at 3,012.70, near its 3,044.37 high of January 2010. "Unless we continue to get extremely good economic data and corporate earnings, we could be on course for a correction," De Leus said. Across Europe, the FTSE 100 index gained 0.7 percent, Germany's DAX was flat and France's CAC 40 was down 0.2 percent.