US stocks ended little-changed on Friday in a shortened session a day after the Thanksgiving holiday, with retailers in focus as Black Friday sales started the important year-end shopping season.
Investors shrugged off a steep plunge in Chinese stocks, sparked after authorities opened investigations into several brokerages.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped to 17,798.49, down 14.9 points (0.08 percent), as Walt Disney Co weighed.
The broad-based S&P 500 edged up 1.24 (0.6 percent) to 2,090.11, while the tech-rich NASDAQ Composite Index advanced 11.38 (0.22 percent) to 5,127.52.
“Unsurprisingly, the Friday session was very quiet with trading volume running well below average,” Briefing.com said.
Stocks had moved little in the week’s first three days of trading. Markets were closed on Thursday for Thanksgiving Day, and closed three hours early on Friday, at 6pm GMT. No economic indicators were on the agenda.
“With nothing in the way of earnings or economic data to digest, traders will await Black Friday updates from retailers,” Alex Eppstein at Schaeffer’s Investment Research said.
The National Retail Federation is to release spending results for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend today.
Shoppers flocked to stores for Black Friday sales, the start of the year-end holiday promotions that account for a large part of retailers’ full-year earnings.
Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc fell 0.6 percent on the Dow. Macy’s Inc dropped nearly 1 percent and Gap Inc tumbled 2.2 percent.
In contrast, Target Corp rose 0.4 percent reporting a strong start to its Black Friday weekend, especially a 35 percent jump in online orders for in-store pickup on Thanksgiving. Online behemoth Amazon.com fell 0.3 percent.
Disney was a big drag on the Dow, tumbling nearly 3 percent, after revealing a drop in subscribers to its sports cable television network, ESPN. The entertainment company, in a regulatory filing, said ESPN had 92 million subscribers in its just-ended fiscal year, down from 95 million a year ago.
NXP Semiconductors soared 4.6 percent after announcing it cleared the last regulatory hurdle, with China, to complete its merger with Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The Netherlands-based chipmaker had already won approval for the sale of its RP Power business to Jianguang Asset Management Co Ltd, a condition for the Freescale merger.
Nike Inc rose 0.2 percent.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six