European shares closed higher on Friday, marking weekly gains as investors focused on a broadly supportive earnings season and improving economic data in Europe rather than rising US-China tensions.
The main indices spent the morning in the red after US President Donald Trump moved to ban US transactions with the Chinese owners of messaging app WeChat (微信) and video-sharing app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), further escalating friction with Beijing.
Amsterdam-listed Prosus NV, with its biggest investment in WeChat owner Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), fell 4 percent.
However, market stabilized later, boosted by telecoms, technology and healthcare stocks.
The pan-European STOXX 600, which rose 0.3 percent for the day, closed out with weekly gains of 2 percent.
German stocks rose 0.7 percent, while London’s FTSE 100 and France’s CAC 40 were flat, but all logged weekly rises.
Data showed that US jobs last month increased by a better-than-expected 1.763 million, although the pace of recovery slowed amid a resurgence in new COVID-19 infections, pressuring the White House and the US Congress to agree another aid package.
“The jobs numbers were surprisingly good,” said Nancy Tengler, chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments. “But we expect a moderation in jobs improvement in the near term, as businesses wait to see what Washington comes up with.”
With the bulk of the European earnings season over, investors were relieved that most companies had exceeded analysts’ lowered forecasts for quarterly profits.
About 60 percent of the STOXX 600 companies that have reported so far beat estimates, Refinitiv data showed.
Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC jumped 10.9 percent after saying that it had started manufacturing remdesivir, an approved treatment for COVID-19 from US-based Gilead Sciences Inc, and it raised its annual sales outlook for two of its biggest divisions.
Deutsche Telekom AG, which owns 43 percent of T-Mobile US Inc, rose 2.7 percent after the US firm added more monthly subscribers than expected in the second quarter of this year and said it surpassed rival AT&T Inc.
The broader telecoms index rose 1 percent to lead sectoral gains, although stocks considered more sensitive to business cycles, including banks, miners and oil and gas companies, handed back some of this week’s steady gains.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained