European stocks posted their biggest weekly gain this year, sending the STOXX Europe 600 Index to its highest level in six months, as manufacturing increased globally and the US jobless rate fell to the lowest in three years.
Xstrata PLC and Glencore International PLC surged more than 13 percent after the world’s largest publicly traded commodities trader held talks to buy the Zug, Switzerland-based mining company. Temenos Group AG rallied 20 percent as Misys PLC, the British maker of software for banks, said it has held talks about a merger with the Swiss company.
The STOXX 600 climbed 3.6 percent to 264.6 this week, extending last month’s rally of 4 percent that was the best start to a year since 1998. The equity gauge has gained 8.2 percent this year and is up 23 percent since its two-and-a-half-year low on Sept. 22.
“We had a very good week,” Veronika Pechlaner, who helps manage £1.1 billion (US$1.7 billion) at Jersey, Channel Islands-based Ashburton Ltd, said in a telephone interview. The US employment numbers “are providing more hope to the market that the recovery in the US is not only on track, but maybe accelerating a little bit.”
The STOXX 600 surged 2 percent on Wednesday, the most in six weeks, as gauges of manufacturing increased from the US to China.
The Markit Economics final purchasing managers’ index, a gauge of manufacturing in the eurozone, climbed to 48.8 last month from 46.9 in the prior month. A UK manufacturing index also jumped to an eight-month high.
The European stocks gauge rallied 1.7 percent on Friday after US Labor Department figures showed employment climbed more than forecast, with a 243,000 increase in payrolls.
All 19 industry groups in the STOXX 600 gained more than 1.2 percent.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts