Traders work at the Frankfurt stock exchange. The DAX 30 tumbled 2% to 9,350.75 points yesterday.
Dow Jones/London
European stock markets slid into the close yesterday as investors sold off ahead of the weekend on fears the crisis in Ukraine could escalate. Earlier in the day, indexes pared losses after the highly anticipated US nonfarm-payrolls report beat expectations.
The Stoxx Europe 600 index slumped 1.3% to close at 333.06, losing 1.5% on the week and marking the first weekly slide since January.
Leading decliners, shares of Getinge AB tumbled 21% after the medical-technology company said its profit trend for the first quarter will be weak due to a lower level of invoicing.
Shares of Fugro NV fell 2.1% after the oil-field-services firm posted 2013 earnings that missed expectations.
Shares of Air France-KLM SA jumped 4.4% after the airline said passenger traffic rose 1.4% in February, boosted by a rise in both long and medium-haul flights.
More broadly, most European stock markets closed in deep-red territory, ending a week that was marked by increased tensions between Russia and Ukraine. The crisis intensified yesterday afternoon after the part state-owned Gazprom said it might halt gas deliveries to Ukraine as it did in 2009, because the country hasn’t paid for its February supply. Gazprom also said Ukraine owes it $1.89bn for gas, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The US and the European Union has condemned Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and earlier in the week unveiled a set of sanctions to punish Russia for the intervention. France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, reportedly said Friday that a second round of sanctions could be on the cards if the first round doesn’t work.
Chatter that big US pension funds were rebalancing their asset portfolios by dumping equities and instead moving into bonds, also appeared to weigh on the European stock markets.
Germany’s DAX 30 index lost 2% to 9,350.75 and ended the week 3.5% lower. Twenty nine out of the 30 companies listed on the DAX 30 closed in negative territory, with Continental AG leading decliners, down 3.2%, after Commerzbank downgraded the car-parts and tire maker to hold from buy, according to Dow Jones News Wires.
The UK’s FTSE 100 index gave up 1.1% to 6,712.67, for a 1.4% weekly decline. France’s CAC 40 index lost 1.2% to 4,366.42 and ended the week 1% lower.
Banks were lower across most of Europe, with shares of Deutsche Bank AG down 2.7% in Frankfurt, Credit Agricole SA off 2.8% in Paris and heavyweight HSBC Holdings 1% lower in London.
Earlier in the day, Europe’s stock markets briefly moved into positive territory after the US nonfarm-payrolls report beat expectations. After sluggish readings for December and January, 175,000 jobs were added to the economy in February, signaling the economy hasn’t slowed as much as a recent spate of indicators appear to suggest. An unusually hard winter has impacted macroeconomic data over recent months and economists still say it may take another month or two to get an accurate picture of the health of the economy because of the weather effects.