Community Psychiatric Calls Off 2 Acquisitions : Health care: A stock slide and a poor third quarter may have turned the chain away from buying two Texas companies.

Less than two weeks after reporting a 98% drop in third-quarter earnings, Community Psychiatric Centers International Inc. said Tuesday that it has abandoned its offer to buy two Texas health-care companies for an estimated $300 million.

“For now, it’s dead,” said Community Psychiatric spokeswoman Suzanne Hovdey, adding: “What the future holds, I really can’t say.”

Meanwhile, the hospital chain’s stock hit a 52-week low of $15.50 on Monday, rebounding only slightly Tuesday to close at $15.75 in heavy New York Stock Exchange trading. The stock has closed as high as $38.63 per share this year.

Stock analysts blamed the slide on the poor third-quarter results as well as investor squeamishness about the troubled psychiatric-care industry as a whole.

Blaming pricing pressures and uncollected bills, Community Psychiatric reported third-quarter earnings of $435,000 on revenues of $90.3 million, compared to earnings of $19.7 million on revenues of $94.9 million for the same period in 1990.

Community Psychiatric made an initial offer for Austin-based Healthcare International Inc. and Healthvest on Sept. 3, in a bid that analysts valued at roughly $76 million and the assumption of $254 million in debt. Healthvest President Clark Abbott valued the offer even higher, at $350 million.

On Sept. 27, however, as it announced the disastrous third-quarter results, Community also lowered its offer by about 10%, according to analysts.

Healthcare International, which is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, accepted the revised offer, but Healthvest’s board of directors did not respond by Community’s Oct. 4 deadline. Abbott of Healthvest could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

In a terse statement released Tuesday, Community Psychiatric said that both offers had expired but that the company “will continue to investigate other strategic acquisitions when they are properly valued.” Spokeswoman Hovdey declined to elaborate.

“They must have had a change of heart,” said Joyce Albers, health-care analyst with First Boston Corp. in New York. “Either they have something else in their back pocket, and are therefore not unhappy, or it gave them an out. . . . Certainly if I were in management’s shoes, I’d be reassessing.”

John F. Hindelong, analyst with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York, said a slump in much of the psychiatric-care industry means that the purchase price of psychiatric hospitals “is not going to go up anytime soon, so there’s no rush to get (an acquisition) done.”

“It would be prudent for them to wait a quarter or so before jumping into another acquisition . . . ,” agreed Rae Alperstein of Kemper Securities Group Inc. in Los Angeles. “In light of the extreme pressure on the psychiatric-care industry right now, they would do well to stick to their knitting for the time being.”

Psychiatric-care stocks have fared worse than the market in general, Hindelong said. Community Psychiatric stock fell 32.4% in September, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down less than 1%, he said. The stock of National Medical Enterprises of Santa Monica fell 5.8% last month, and plunged another 20% Monday on reports that billing practices at some of its psychiatric-care hospitals are being investigated.

However, Hindelong said even psychiatric-care companies with strong fundamentals have seen their stock prices slip.

“I think it’s a question of guilt by association,” Hindelong said.

CPC’s Stock Performance Community Psychiatric Center’s stock hit a 52-week low Monday, closing at $15.50, off 60% from its high in March of $38.63. 1990 10/19: $26.38 1991 1/4: $38.63 10/7: $15.5* *Indicates a partial period Source: Dow Jones News Retrieval