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.
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list