Takeover target Bingo a winner

THE Australian sharemarket surged on Tuesday, with a takeover target, an outage-hit tech firm and a fast food favourite among the winners.

The benchmark S&P/ ASX200 index steadily rose through the morning to close 1.19 per cent higher at 6742.6 while the All Ordinaries Index gained 1.15 per cent to 7015.

While Wall Street was closed on Monday for a public holiday, Axi chief global market strategist Stephen Innes said there was investor optimism ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration day. And with China’s activity back to a preCOVID growth path, Asian markets opened upbeat on Tuesday, Mr Innes said.

Waste management company Bingo Industries announced it was considering a $2.3bn takeover bid of $3.50 per share by Australian private equity group CPE Capital and a consortium of investors.

The news sent its shares soaring 20.44 per cent to $3.30 and seemed to flow on to rival Cleanaway, which rose 3.64 per cent to $2.56.

Domino’s Pizza jumped 7.97 per cent to $89.59 after Macquarie upgraded its assessment of the fast food chain.

Payments tech firm Tyro hit back at damning criticism by short sellers Viceroy Research and confirmed about 15 per cent of its EFTPOS terminals remain offline, a fortnight after the outage began, but says it expects to have them fixed by the end of this week.

Tyro shares, which have been hammered by the glitch, rocketed 25 per cent to $2.90.

The Aussie dollar was buying 77.06 US cents, 56.63 British pence and 63.7 Euro cents in afternoon trade.