Online furniture retailer Temple & Webster tanked 32.3 per cent after saying its sales rose 18 per cent over that same time period. The trading update suggested a sharp slowdown in growth over the past three months, as the company said in August sales from July to mid-August were up by 28 per cent.
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“The magnitude of the slowdown is surprising” given recent updates from rivals Nick Scali and Adairs’s Mocka, Citigroup analysts led by Sam Teeger wrote in a note. Nick Scali, which reported strong sales growth in Australia and New Zealand during the September quarter, rose 0.2 per cent.
Consumer staples advanced with other retailers, with supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles up 1.6 per cent and 0.5 per cent, respectively, while dairy producer A2 Milk rose 1.1 per cent and bottle shop owner Endeavour gained 0.3 per cent. Warehouse and data centre owner Goodman Group gained 1.3 per cent, lifting the property sector.
Fisher & Paykel jumped 4.8 per cent, driving healthcare stocks higher, after the medical devices maker said its net profit rose 39 per cent in the first half of its financial year and raised its profit forecast for the full year, thanks to strong demand for its breathing and surgical hospital products. Sleep treatments maker ResMed rose 2.1 per cent, while chemist giant Sigma Pharmaceuticals gained 0.3 per cent.
Shares of counter-drone company Electro Optic Systems Holdings rallied 3.6 per cent despite news Australia’s corporate regulator is suing its former chief executive Ben Greene, claiming he breached his director’s duties by failing to disclose downgrades worth tens of millions of dollars to the company’s revenue in 2022.
The nation’s mining heavyweights also advanced, with iron ore behemoths BHP, Fortescue Metals and Rio Tinto up 2 per cent, 2.4 per cent and 1.4 per cent, respectively. Gold miners also gained, with Northern Star Resources rising per cent 1.8 per cent and Evolution Mining increasing 1 per cent.
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On Wall Street overnight, the S&P 500 rose 0.9 per cent after breaking out of a morning lull and is back within 1.8 per cent of its all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.4 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7 per cent higher.
The gains for indexes masked some big swings underneath the surface, particularly among stocks linked to the artificial-intelligence industry.
A report that Meta Platforms is in talks to use Google’s chips sent shares of its parent Alphabet soaring. The stock finished 1.6 per cent higher after jumping as much as 3.2 per cent, putting it on track to hit a $US4 trillion market capitalisation for the first time. Alphabet has added nearly $US1 trillion ($1.64 trillion) in market value since mid-October, helped by Warren Buffett taking a $US4.9 billion stake and broader Wall Street enthusiasm for its recently released Gemini AI model.
Rival chip companies dropped sharply after the report. Nvidia dropped 2.6 per cent and was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 by far, while Advanced Micro Devices sank 4.2 per cent.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, meanwhile, saw its stock that trades in the United States fall 2.3 per cent after losing an early gain. It reported stronger revenue than analysts expected for the latest quarter thanks in part to the AI boom, but its overall profit fell short of forecasts.
Apple edged up 0.4 per cent amid a prediction it will reclaim its crown as the world’s largest smartphone maker from Samsung for the first time in more than a decade, lifted by the successful debut of its iPhone 17 and a rush of consumers upgrading devices, according to Counterpoint Research. The company is also benefiting from a cooling of US-China trade tensions and a depreciating US dollar that has boosted purchases in emerging markets, said Counterpoint Research.
with AP, Bloomberg
