European shares were little changed on Friday, while France’s stock market dropped in the final trading session before the nation’s presidential election today.
The STOXX Europe 600 closed little changed at 378.12 in London. France’s CAC 40 Index fell 0.4 percent, trimming an earlier drop of as much as 1 percent.
The European regional benchmark saw a weekly drop of 0.6 percent, its steepest since late January.
The latest Opinionway poll showed support for independent candidate Emmanuel Macron and far-right contestant Marine Le Pen was stable at 23 percent and 22 percent respectively.
French voters go to the polls in a first-round vote, with Macron and Le Pen the frontrunners to advance to the final election next month.
The murder of a policeman on the Champs-Elysees has forced an early end to campaigning for the leading candidates, with the race wide open, according to polls.
“The possibility of a hard-right Marine Le Pen presidency has worried markets for some time, but another risk scenario to consider is the victory of far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon,” Roubini Global Economics senior economist Lars Lundqvist said. “If either Le Pen or Melenchon make it to the second round, markets would stay on their toes a bit longer.”
Danone SA dropped as much as 2.9 percent after reporting the third consecutive quarterly drop in volume and including its US$10 billion takeover of WhiteWave Foods Co in its organic growth for the year.
European equities are still priced for a slight valuation premium linked to acceleration in global growth momentum and are not reflecting an “obvious political risk discount,” Deutsche Bank AG strategists, including Sebastian Raedler, wrote in a note.
Investors in European lenders are getting cold feet. Bets for swings in lenders’ stocks have jumped and options reached their highest prices since February last year relative to those for euro-area blue chips.
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