European shares rose on Friday after US President Donald Trump predicted a swift end to a damaging trade war with China.
The market appeared unfazed by British Prime Minister Theresa May’s resignation as leader of the Conservative Party after failing in a final attempt to win parliamentary support for her divorce deal with the EU.
The pan-European STOXX 600 on Friday ended up 2.10 points, or 0.56 percent, at 375.90, but posted a weekly loss of 1.5 percent from 381.51 and remained on track for its first monthly decline since a steep sell-off at the end of last year.
Trump late on Thursday said that US complaints against Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (華為) could be resolved within the broader trade framework, although no high-level bilateral talks have been scheduled yet.
Trump’s comments on Huawei showed the issues were linked, “and that he remains amenable to a broad deal,” Deutsche Bank AG research analysts said.
The STOXX 600 rose on broad-based gains led by the utility sector, gaining 1.3 percent percent for its best day in more than two months.
Mining stocks and insurers followed, while China-focused semiconductors stocks pushed the European tech sector 0.36 percent higher.
Milan’s MIB led the way among country indices with a 1.2 percent rise, recovering from Thursday’s more than 2 percent slide.
Germany’s trade-sensitive DAX on Friday rose 58.63 points, or 0.5 percent to 12,011.04, a 1.9 percent plunge from a close of 12,238.94 on May 17.
London’s FTSE 100 on Friday held gains to gain 46.69 points, or 0.7 percent, to 7,277.73 after May’s widely expected announcement. However, that was still a 1 percent drop from 7,348.62 a week earlier.
May said that she would resign by June 7 after failing to deliver Brexit, setting up a Conservative Party contest that would install a new British prime minister who would have to pursue a cleaner break with the EU.
“No surprise with that announcement, the bigger shock would have been if she didn’t announce a date,” Atlantic Markets’ John Woolfitt said.
France’s Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA shares topped the STOXX 600, rising 7.5 percent after the retailer said that its parent company Rallye’s filing for protection from creditors had no impact on the execution of its strategy.
Healthcare stocks Novartis International AG and Roche Holding AG were the biggest gainers. Brokerage Jefferies Group LLC maintained its positive stance on EU large-cap pharmaceuticals and named Roche its top pick.
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