ASX up as supermarkets rise
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The news: The Australian sharemarket ended higher today as large consumer staples companies enjoyed gains.
The numbers: The benchmark ASX 200 finished up 0.13% to 7,663, with six out of 11 sectors finished in green.
Consumer staples was the best performing sector, up 2.15%, followed by IT (1.26%) and energy (0.52%). Large supermarkets Coles and Woolworths were both up 5.79% and 1.13% respectively. Today, Coles posted a fall in profit but a rise in revenue and sales led to cheers from investors as results were better than expected.
Treasury Wines was also up, 0.82%, as it looks forward to China potentially lifting Australian wine import tariffs next month. Endeavour also lifted 4.92%, after the company reported a 2.5% rise in group sales for the first half of the financial year on Monday.
The best performing stock was Reece, up 19.22%, after posting better-than-expected profit results and what UBS analysts called “impressive” cost control.
The worst performing sector was AREITs, down 0.86%, followed by utilities (-0.74%) and healthcare (-0.61%).
John Lyng Group had the largest fall at 13.06% as the company posted a sales revenue fall of 4%, an NPAT fall of 8.8% during the first half of the financial year. However, its group EBITDA was up 7.5% and the company posted a 3.5% revenue upgrade and a 5% EBITDA upgrade for FY24.
The Australian dollar is higher buying US65.45 cents.
The context: Wednesday will see the Australian Bureau of Statistics release inflation figures for January. The data will be taken into consideration by the Reserve Bank when they gather next month to make a monetary policy decision.
Earnings season continues with Perpetual, Flight Centre, Worley, Steadfast, and Spark NZ posting results on Wednesday.
