European stocks fell for a second week as concern lingered that the region’s debt crisis is deepening and the US Federal Reserve refrained from taking new action to bolster the world’s largest economy.
BNP Paribas SA and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG led banks and carmakers lower, falling more than 7 percent as investors shunned companies with profits most tied to economic growth. Logica PLC plunged 23 percent after the Anglo-Dutch computer-services provider reduced its sales-growth forecast.
The STOXX Europe 600 Index slid 2.8 percent to 233.71 this past week. The benchmark gauge has slumped 15 percent this year as the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis spread to Italy and Spain and economic growth in the US slowed.
“There is a risk that we will get a pretty serious recession in Europe,” Edinburgh-based Kames Capital PLC strategy chief Bill Dinning said. Kames Capital manages £47 billion (US$73 billion).
Moody’s Investors Service said it will review the ratings of all EU countries in the first quarter because an EU summit on Dec. 8 and Dec. 9 failed to deliver “decisive policy measures” to end the debt crisis.
Investors cut holdings in European stocks, with 35 percent saying they were “underweight” in the region this month, compared with 30 percent last month.
National benchmark indexes fell in all of the 18 western European markets.
France’s CAC 40 lost 6.3 percent, Germany’s DAX slid 4.8 percent and the UK’s FTSE 100 sank 2.6 percent.
BNP Paribas, France’s biggest bank, retreated 15 percent. Societe Generale SA also declined 15 percent and HSBC Holdings PLC, the region’s largest lender, dropped 4.8 percent.
A gauge of banks in the STOXX 600 fell 6.1 percent, extending its slump for the year to 35 percent.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by