This was published 4 years ago
That’s all folks from Alex Druce, who has finished his last day of market action with us, and Colin Kruger who will be back on Monday with all the market action alongside Lucy Battersby.
Thanks for all your time and comments.
Good night.
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The Australian sharemarket bounced off a two-week low on Friday to secure a narrow weekly rise, helped along by gains for the iron ore giants and energy firms and optimism over the nation’s vaccination progress.
Positive moves for Commonwealth Bank, NAB, biotech CSL and a new record high for Macquarie Group also helped the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 rise as it added 0.5 per cent to close at 7522.9.
The market managed to finish the week 0.5 per cent ahead - its best performance in three weeks - as the book closed on a largely satisfying earnings season, and the end of August marked the 16th monthly rise in the past 17 months.
Friday’s advance halted a two-day slide for the local bourse, with investors seemingly happy to take their lead from a record-setting Wall Street.
The Australian sharemarket bounced off a two-week low on Friday to secure a narrow weekly rise, helped by gains for the iron ore giants and energy firms.
A rise for Commonwealth Bank, NAB, CSL and a new record high for Macquarie Group also helped the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 as it added 0.5 per cent to close at 7522.9.
Friday’s rise halted a two-day slide for the local bourse, with local investors seeming to take their lead from a record-setting Wall Street.
The ASX 200 even managed to finish the week 0.5 per cent ahead - its best performance in three weeks - as it shut the book on a largely satisfying earnings season.
Popular bag maker Crumpler has collapsed into administration one year after celebrating its 25th anniversary, with the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking more havoc on the country’s retailers.
Notices published by corporate regulator ASIC on Thursday showed insolvency firm PKF was appointed administrator of the trendy bag manufacturer, which is headquartered on Melbourne’s busy Russell Street.
Crumpler was founded in 1995 by Dave Roper, Will Miller and Stuart Crumpler, originally selling messenger bags designed to make it easier to ferry a slab of beer home on your bike. Over the years, the company became a popular brand, especially among younger shoppers, gaining notoriety for its bright colours and compact designs.
In 2014, private equity firm Crescent Capital Partners took a majority stake in the business, buying out two of the original founders and spurring on a round of international expansion, with the business launching across Asia, the US and Europe.
Endeavour Group’s maiden accounts gave Twitter the big answer it has been looking for since lockdowns blighted the landscape: What were people drinking during their incarceration.
Dan Murphy’s owner Endeavour - recently spun off from Woolworths - says the switch to in-home consumption lasted well into the December half year but began to normalise when restrictions were lifted.
And what were people drinking? “All major categories of drinks were in growth for FY21, with the exception of cider. The trend with spirits continued, growing at over 20 per cent in FY21,” says Endeavour.
Consumers were not downgrading either.
Prominent businessman Ziggy Switkowski is facing calls to resign as chancellor of Melbourne’s RMIT university over his appointment as chairman of the crisis-stricken casino giant Crown Resorts.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which represents university staff and academics, has said the former Telstra and Optus boss’ new role at the James Packer-backed gambling giant is inconsistent with RMIT’s values.
“The NTEU and the wide RMIT community expects chancellors to demonstrate a commitment to social wellbeing and the public interest,” the union told members on Thursday in an email seen by this masthead.
A union petition calling for Dr Switkowski’s immediate resignation says that Crown has “been shown time and again to be a socially destructive force”.
Billion-dollar battery metals explorer Liontown Resources was trading at all-time highs this afternoon after unveiling a plan to spin out its non-lithium assets and list them separately on the ASX.
Liontown, which has more than tripled in value this year amid a lithium price boom, wants to split out its Minerals 260 business to ensure it is free to focus on developing its world-class Kathleen Valley Lithium Project in Western Australia.
The demerger will result in two separate ASX-listed, Western Australian oriented businesses, with Minerals 260 to take charge of exploring for PGE-nickel-copper-gold in Western Australia’s Julimar region.
The $1.8 billion Liontown on Friday was trading 8 per cent higher at $1.01 and got to an all-time peak of $1.03 following management’s presentation from Perth this morning.
More than one dozen ASX-listed companies, including Cochlear, Premier and Tabcorp, have declined to return JobKeeper payments to the government in full despite booking millions of dollars in profits last financial year.
Retailer Harvey Norman caved in to public pressure by returning $6 million in JobKeeper payments to the government this week, sparking fresh calls for greater transparency around how the multibillion-dollar wage subsidy scheme was deployed.
Analysis of company disclosures and ASX statements by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald shows that at least 13 ASX-listed firms that received JobKeeper have not returned the payments in full despite reporting rising profits in the recent financial year.
Hearing implant provider Cochlear has returned $23.1 million in JobKeeper payments but will retain the $10.4 million it received between April and May 2020, despite booking a $327 million statutory net profit for FY21, which is higher than its pre-pandemic profit levels.
Cochlear’s chief executive Dig Howitt said the company was not profitable during the period the initial JobKeeper payments were received and the wage subsidies had “helped us retain employees - being used as it was intended”.
The elephant in the global room is China’s ferocious property squeeze. Xi Jinping is deliberately breaking the back of the world’s biggest financial bubble.
The Chinese economy already has one foot in recession - by its own cyclical standards - and is heading for a hard-landing over the next few months as construction is starved of credit.
“Markets should be prepared for what could be a much worse-than-expected growth slowdown, and potential stock market turmoil,” said Ting Lu, Nomura’s chief China economist. The scale of China’s cement addiction is eye-watering. “Half the world’s cranes are in China. We’re talking about 50 per cent of the global construction business,” he said.
Home building and property make up 17 per cent of Chinese GDP, including furniture and appliances. The sector also generates 44 per cent of local government revenues through land sales and fees, injecting $US1.3 trillion ($1.8 trillion) a year into the economy as quasi-fiscal spending. All told, property makes up a quarter of the Chinese economy, three times the relative weighting of America’s extreme bubble in 2007.
The fact that research on local travel stocks seems to focus as much on COVID vaccination charts as travel statistics says it all about the sector’s immediate future.
Investors are still preparing for lift-off when borders open and people can start travelling again in numbers later this year. If all goes to plan.
It means we have to look to places like the US, where locals are free to travel, to see how a travel recovery looks. Checkpoint volumes from the US Transport Security Administration (TSA) - which acts as a proxy for air travel volumes - has returned to just 76 per cent of pre-COVID levels.
Leisure has fully recovered but corporate travel is the laggard, according to the data.
Analysts report that flight volumes were 80 per cent of pre-COVID levels in China, France and Germany by the end of July.
It’s good news for Flight Centre which now has more than half of its earnings sourced from the US, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.