The Paris stock market is down 1.5% this morning, around 7395 points, the trend being marked by heavy declines for STMicro (-11.6%), Renault (-8.3%), Vivendi (-8.3%) and Stellantis, which is down 6.7%, acknowledging that its results 'did not live up to (its) expectations'.

The morning was punctuated by a large number of quarterly earnings releases.

While Sanofi this morning raised its outlook for 2024, STMicroelectronics lowered its own, citing the reluctance of its customers in the automotive sector.

In Europe, a number of stock market heavyweights such as Nestlé and Roche also presented their accounts this morning.

Plagued by the disappointing performances of Alphabet and Tesla, Wall Street had its worst session of the year on Wednesday, with sell-offs on a broad front.

The Nasdaq fell by more than 3.6% under the effect of a powerful sell-off that heavily affected the "Magnificent Seven" and semiconductor stocks, which had been the driving forces since the end of October 2023.

On the macroeconomic front, investors will have to examine a number of indicators, starting with the first estimate of US economic growth, due to be published at 2.30pm.

The consensus forecast is for 1.8% annualized growth in the second quarter.

In the meantime, investors took note of the fall in business sentiment in France: this deteriorated sharply in July compared with the previous month, according to Insee's synthetic indicator, which dropped five points to 94, taking it to its lowest level since February 2021.

Still on the statistics front, Germany's Ifo business climate index fell from 88.6 in June to 87 in July, a drop 'much greater than the consensus (88.9)', but closer to Capital Economics' forecast (87.5).

On the bond market, German Bund yields eased towards 2.40%. The same was true on the other side of the Atlantic, with ten-year paper falling to 4.24%.

A further factor of uncertainty weighed on risk appetite, with the fall in oil prices and Brent crude losing 0.4% to $81.2.

In the news for French companies, Stellantis unveiled lower-than-expected first-half results on Thursday. Net sales fell by 14% to 85 billion euros in the first six months of the year, giving operating income before non-recurring items of 8.5 billion euros, or a margin of 10%. By way of comparison, the consensus forecast was for sales of 86.5 billion euros, operating profit of 8.8 billion euros and a profit margin of 10.2%.

Air France-KLM reports net income of 165 million euros for the second quarter of 2024, down 447 million euros, with operating margin down 3.1 points to 6.5%, despite sales up 4.3% to 7.95 billion euros.

In line with its preliminary announcement, Dassault Systèmes reports non-IFRS EPS of 0.60 euro for the first half of 2024, up 10% at constant exchange rates, with a non-IFRS operating margin of 30.5% versus 31% for the same period in 2023.

Finally, Eurazeo announces assets under management (AUM) of 35.3 billion euros at the end of June 2024, up 9% year-on-year, including fee-generating assets (FPAUM) of 25.7 billion (+10% year-on-year).


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