After a slow Monday (20th July), the market burst upwards hitting a high of 6,150 points. This was off the back of a similar run in the US market.
We’ve moved 1 company from our watchlist into the folio. Purchase entry detailed below.
We bought a parcel in 1 other pharmaceutical company in the last week of July (27th July, Monday). Also updated in Purchase entries below for members.
Also worth checking out our member only article that answers the question: Will there be another share market crash in 2020?
CEO Insights
Employment & Workplace
“By the start of the second quarter, we saw the biggest workforce shift and reallocation of skills since World War 2, with skills needs shifting from aviation and hospitality to driving and information security at an unprecedented scale”
Jonas Prising, CEO, ManpowerGroup Inc [world’s second largest employment firm]
“LinkedIn continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously”
Ryan Roslansky, CEO, LinkedIn
“More companies will adopt more permanent remote work coming out of this crisis, which will have a positive environmental impact as congestion eases in cities and hopefully, improve quality of life for more people, and uptake in the use of technology by more people than ever before will catalyze change in many industries”
Larry Fink, CEO, BlackRock Inc
“I haven’t heard a great alternative that allows companies to build careers, build leaders, build culture, build camaraderie entirely remotely. But who knows, it may happen. I mean there’s all kinds of innovation happening so it’s possible, but our bias is that people will congregate in person in offices, again, in a meaningful way”
Joey Levin, CEO, InterActiveCorp [global media conglomerate]
Banking, Finance & Lending
“Do you keep using public finances to support companies or do you let creative destruction happen? This is going to be a real challenge particularly in the SME space around the world, I suspect this will be a big, big challenge next year. This means that you’ll start seeing a lot more default, which in turn means that you’ll start seeing the problems spill over to the financial sector”
Piyush Gupta, CEO, DBS Bank Ltd [multinational banking group]
Telecommunication
“If there was ever a moment in time for a resetting of the vision for the next 10 years for telecommunications, as we are on the sort of eve, if you like, of the rollout of the NBN, we’re in the dawn of the 5G era, we need a road map for the future”
Andy Penn, CEO, Telstra Corporation Ltd
Energy & Resources
“As economic growth returns, we expect the key producing regions to maintain productive spare capacity so they can quickly meet demand. Offshore, longer cycle barrels and new exploration activity will likely be the farthest out in terms of incremental contribution to the supply stack”
Jeff Miller, CEO, Halliburton Company [world’s second largest oilfield services company]
“In order to achieve a sustainable energy future, we have to have sustainable energy generation, which I think is going to be primarily solar and followed by wind, and those are intermittent. So, you need to have a lot of batteries to store the solar energy because the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. So, there’s three elements of the sustainable energy future: wind and solar sustainable energy generation; battery storage; and electric transport”
Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Inc
Retail
“Consumers [will now] pay more attention to health and hygiene, meaning that there is an increasing need for products that can boost personal resilience and physical well-being. Hence, we see a clear demand for vacuum cleaners and for air and water purifiers, but also for dishwashers and washing machines”
Jonas Samuelson, CEO, AB Electrolux
Automotive
“Obviously over the medium to long term, the prospects of coming back to a positive trend line with the megatrends of increased population mobilisation, e-commerce, etc., they are still there”
Martin Lundstedt, CEO, AB Volvo
Aviation
“I can’t see any changes in the marketplace in terms of that countries will avoid continuing with protecting their societies and protecting their countries. And the geopolitical situation is not going really in the right direction. It’s actually becoming a bit worse during the COVID-19. So, I see still our prospects being extremely valid [for selling non-civilian aircraft components] going forward”
Micael Johansson, CEO, Saab AB
Media & Advertising
“Advertising demand in Q3 has historically been bolstered by factors that appear unlikely to materialise in the same way they have in prior years, including the back-to-school season, film release schedules, and the operations of various sports leagues”
Derek Anderson, CFO, Snap Inc
Technology
“The trend we see in the market is clear. Clients want to modernise apps, move more workloads to the cloud and automate IT tasks. They want to infuse AI [artificial intelligence] into their workflows and secure their IT infrastructure to fend off growing cybersecurity threats. As a result, we are seeing an increased opportunity of large transformational projects”
Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM Corp
“Acute skills shortages in tech, cyber security, software development, and data analysts for example continue unabated, reinforcing that the need for skills revolution is here in force”
Jonas Prising, CEO, ManpowerGroup Inc [world’s second largest employment firm]
COVID update
Week beginning 27th July
Another all time high of 530+ cases in Australia with no surprises as to Victoria being the worst affected.
Week ending 17th July
An Oxford University team has released promising results showing it’s vaccine candidate triggers an immune response with minimal side effects. They’re partnered with a British-Swedish distribution partner AstraZeneca who has production facilities in Sydney. It’s not clear yet if they have he right to manufacture and produce locally.
Australia would have to negotiate with global health organisations on sourcing supply.
Victoria cases were up and down before recording a new high today with the latest update at 484 new cases. Recovery looks weeks away.
The rest of Australia continues to do well.
