Europe’s main stock markets ended the week on pause on Friday, with downbeat sentiment over the deadly Nice truck attack offsetting Wall Street records and positive Chinese data.
Airline stocks slid after a gunman late on Thursday smashed a truck into a crowd in the French resort of Nice, killing at least 84 people in what French President Francois Hollande declared a “terrorist” attack.
Accor Hotels led losers on the Paris market in shedding 3 percent as the French tourism industry fretted at the latest in a slew of recent attacks, while transport firms and luxury goods makers also fell back.
Overall, the Paris market closed the session off 0.3 percent at 4,372.51 points.
At the close in London, the benchmark FTSE 100 index edged into positive territory, adding 0.2 percent to 6,669.24 points, while Frankfurt’s DAX index ended off just 0.01 percent to 10,066,90 points — albeit for a rise of 4.5 percent for the week.
British no-frills airline EasyJet PLC was among the biggest fallers, with its share price closing down 2.6 percent.
“There was an understandably muted tone to the markets... the latest tragedies in France making everything seem a bit frivolous,” Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell said.
Hollande declared three days of mourning after the Nice assault as shellshocked France found itself again mourning its dead after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in January last year and November last year’s massacre in Paris.
Thursday’s attack targeted France’s national holiday Bastille Day that is celebrated each year on July 14.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day