Areva sales rise 6.5 percent in 1st quarter

France's state-owned nuclear engineering giant Areva SA said Thursday its sales grew in the first quarter thanks to strong export demand for its range of reactors and related services.

The Paris-based company reported sales for the three months to March 31 of euro1.94 billion (US$2.57 billion), up 6.5 percent from euro1.82 billion a year earlier.

The nuclear engineering is a rival to reactor builders such as General Electric Co. of the United States; Westinghouse Electric Co., a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba Corp., and Russia's Atomstroyexport. It sad quarterly data is volatile in its industry and isn't a reliable indicator of annual trends.

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