Market commentary
WELLINGTON: Meridian Energy was as unstoppable as Kane Williamson in Christchurch with the electricity gentailer’s shares soaring to fresh highs on the first day of trading for 2021.
The stock closed at $8.59, up a whopping 15.84%, helping push the New Zealand sharemarket 2.1% higher on an otherwise quiet day to kick off the new year.
By the time Williamson notched up his fourth test double century against Pakistan, Meridian’s market value had passed $22 billion, having cracked the $20 billion mark last week.
‘‘It’s a continuation of the interest shown in the stock by clean energy ETF funds adopted over the Christmas break,’’ Milford Asset Management portfolio manager Sam Trethewey said, noting Contact Energy was also sharply higher.
Contact rose 8.64% to $9.68.
‘‘Demand for Contact and Meridian continues to remain strong regardless of the holiday period which is typically driven by offshore closes.’’
Mercury NZ and Genesis Energy were also in demand, their shares up 3.37% and 2.07% at $6.75 and $3.70 respectively.
The S&P/NZX 50 Index climbed its own new heights to 13,367.65, up 276.01 points (2.11%). Across the main board there were 77 gainers and 74 decliners on volume of 60.4 million share transactions worth $177.7 million.
‘‘Generally at the moment we are seeing assets highly sought after by investors,’’ Mr Trethewey said.
‘‘The local housing market is one form of that, the sharemarket is another form of that. The willingness at the moment for investors or the market to look through any shortterm earnings bump due to Covid seems to be still reasonably high. It would have to be something unexpected, or a change in view from central banks which would throw the market off its current course.’’
Infratil shares gained 20c or 2.74% to $7.50 after the investment company disclosed an updated valuation of its investment in CDC Data Centres, showing a near $500 million gain over the past three months.
Infratil, which is defending a $5.37 billion takeover bid from AustralianSuper, said its 48.1% stake was now worth up to $A2.3 billion ($NZ2.45 billion).
Mr Trethewey said it wasn’t surprising to see Infratil highlighting the value of various assets in its portfolio, given its rejection of AustralianSuper’s bid.
Infratil’s share price is trading above the indicative takeover bid, making it very difficult to see the offer succeeding at this point, he said.
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare gained 0.85% to $33.25, a2 Milk was up 10c (0.83%) at $12.17 and Mainfreight was up 0.27% at $69.69.
Fletcher Building fell 1.69% to $5.80. Pacific Edge fell 4.10% to $1.17.
Shares in software company Ike surged 9.26% to $1.18 after the company said it had inked a deal to buy certain assets of Visual Globe’s AI platform for an initial payment of $US3.3 million in cash and a potential earnout component of up to $US4.99 million ($NZ6.91 million) cash and up to $US2.1 million of Ike shares.
Coloradobased Visual Globe’s software platform utilises machine learning across imagery for feature extraction. —