The IBEX 35 rose by 0.45% to 9,224 points at mid-market. Leading the gains is Cellnex, up 2.60% after recent board moves. Acciona, up 2.50%, and Iberdrola, up 1.88%, also pull selectivity up. On the other hand, the biggest pullback came for Banco Sabadell, which fell 2.06%.
One of the main players of the event is Iberdrola, which has informed the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) that today Iberdrola México and Mexico Infrastructure Partners (MIP) signed a letter of intent according to which the trust company will acquire 8,539 MW of installed capacity: 8,436 MW correspond to combined gas circuits and 103 MW wind.
The agreed sales value is approx 6 billion dollars, which are subject to change depending on the closing date of the transaction and other adjustments. The transaction is subject to the agreement and signing of definitive contracts by the parties, the obtaining of necessary regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of certain customary conditions in this type of operation.
Investors should also keep an eye on Acciona. The company has received a EUR 3.1 million order for a sewage treatment plant in Portugal. The plant will serve a population of 4,100 residents.
In the telecoms sector, Telefónica’s share price needs to be watched after Virgin Media, owned by Telefónica and Liberty Global, registered fresh broadband outages.
The market is also still watching Cellnex after former presidents Bertrand Kan and Peter Shore resigned as directors yesterday. The company is on the lookout for a new CEO, which could delay divestitures, analysts at Citigroup warned yesterday, lowering their rating on the stock to neutral from a buy.
Investors must also take into account today that BBVA will pay a gross final dividend of EUR 0.31 per share for 2022, paying out a total of EUR 1,869 million to its shareholders. The bank posted a net profit of 6,420 million in 2022, up 38% from 2021. In February, it announced earlier that it would use 47% of that profit — equivalent to around €3,000 million — to pay shareholders, both in cash dividends and through a share buyback.
Today, it will be macroeconomics that will capture investors’ attention “in a session where we hope so Many investors are staying away from the markets as the Easter holidays approach, which we believe will translate into lower trading volumes than has been the norm up to now,” warns Juan J. Fernández-Figares of Link Management. Thus, later in the day, the final readings for March of the leading economic indices for the services sector, the services PMIs and the US services ISM in the major European economies and in the US will be published. One of the earliest climbers was Spain, which rose to 59.4 in March. The composite of the euro-zone S&P Global Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) hit a 10-month high of 53.7 last month, up from 52.0 in February and down from the preliminary reading of 54.1 .
The general industrial production index (IPI) fell 0.8% year-on-year last February, a rate 2.2 points down from January, the National Institute of Statistics (INE) reported on Wednesday.
Factory orders in Germany rose 4.8% in February from the previous month, when they rose 0.5%, beating market consensus expectations for the third straight monthly increase, amid fears of the ‘moving in’ of the ‘ European locomotive” eliminates a recession.
“Basically and unlike the same indicators, but for the manufacturing sector, all are expected to point to a significant expansion of activity in the month of March,” says the expert, recalling the relative weight of the services sector in the GDP of the developed ones countries is much higher than that of manufacturing, so “some good reads could serve to give investors some reassurance and dissuade many of them from the idea that these economies are on the brink of a possible recession.”
In addition, the ADP payroll processor will release March personal employment numbers in the US as early as this afternoon. Figures well below the 205,000 new private jobs expected by analyst consensus could cause further cuts in some stock markets that have been “overly sensitive and quite volatile” since the crisis of confidence the sector is experiencing began, says banking industry Fernández- Figares.
In the rest of Europe, the DAX is currently down 0.45% to 15,534 points, London’s FTSE 100 is up 0.33% to 7,659, and the CAC 40 is down 0.31% to 7,322. For its part, it falls behind the EURO STOXX 50, which fell 0.39% to 4.2995 points at mid-market.
In the Asian session, Japan’s Nikkei fell sharply, ending a three-day rally as the yen strengthened and fears of a US recession weighed on auto and energy stocks. The Tokyo Nikkei 225 index closed down 1.68% to 27,813 points.
This comes as Japan’s service sector activity grew at its fastest rate in more than nine years in March, suggesting the post-COVID recovery is gaining strength and offsetting weakness in the industrial sector to some extent.
On the bond market, the yield on Spanish bonds with a ten-year term rises to 3.323%, the risk premium compared to Germany is 103 points. The Treasury announced today the placement target in the auctions scheduled for the following week. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US benchmark offers a yield of 3.365%.
Oil prices are stabilizing after rising sharply over the past few days on OPEC+’s recent production cut targets. Benchmark Brent oil futures in Europe fell 0.07% to $84.86 a barrel, while US West Texas was paid at $80.54 (-0.17%).
The cross between the euro and the dollar is at $1.0953 for each common currency.