Yahoo Finance StockBeat: Recession Fears Keep Europe Markets Under Pressure
By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Fears of a global recession kept Europe’s stock markets under pressure again on Thursday, although pockets of strength in the ongoing second-quarter earnings season prevented a renewed rout.
By 5:10 AM ET (0910 GMT), the benchmark Stoxx 600 index was down 0.4% at 364.72, while the German Dax was down 0.6% and the FTSE 100 was down 0.8% as sterling recovered on hopes that a No Deal Brexit may yet be avoided.
Trading was thinner than usual due to the Feast of the Assumption holiday in some markets.
Danish brewer Carlsberg (CSE:CARLa) helped drown some of the continent’s sorrows as a successful campaign of focusing on premium brands resulted in a 6.5% rise in half-year sales and a 1.6 percentage point improvement in operating margins. That was despite volume declines in its biggest single market, Russia. The shares rose 4.9% to a new all-time high and are now up 44% in 2019, one of the best-performing stocks in the region.
There was more good news out of Denmark with AP Moeller - Maersk (CSE:MAERSKa) rising 2.6% after a comparatively strong set of earnings. However, in contrast to Carlsberg (CSE:CARLa), the shares are merely correcting upwards after a drop of nearly 50% in the last two years. Trade wars generally aren’t kind to shipping companies, after all.
In the U.K., gambling company GVC, the owner of Ladbrokes (LON:LCL) and Corals, announced stronger-than-expected earnings and raised its dividend after absorbing the impact of tighter U.K. regulation. The company trimmed its forecast for shop closures in the U.K. by 10% after saying that customers had found other ways to gamble with them after lawmakers cracked down on the use of so-called Fixed-Odds Betting Terminals.
As with Maersk, GVC has much ground to make up after losing half of its value (and its chief executive) in the last 13 months.
Among the prominent losers Thursday were the world’s biggest wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems (CSE:VWS), which cut its guidance after a weaker-than-expected quarter. Deutsche Bank (DE:DBKGn), already afflicted along with other banks by the bond market’s contortions, fell 3% amid a report that it is searching for a new supervisory board chairman to replace Paul Achleitner.
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