YORKSHIRE’S largest listed companies have seen their market value fall by £2bn in the first six weeks of the year, as the markets took fright at signs of a fragile few months.
Morrisons is the only one of the region’s 10 FTSE 350 companies to be trading higher than on January 1, with a 16% rise in its share price adding £580m to its market capitalisation value. The remaining nine have seen their values drop £2.06bn.
Yorkshire’s FTSE 350 companies have seen a combined fall of 8.0% compared with an 11.6% decline on the index.
The biggest fallers have been manufacturer Polypipe, down 15%, and furniture retailer DFS, down 14%.
Polypipe, which entered the FTSE 250 earlier this month to replace Bwin.party after it was taken over by GVC, has also suffered in 2016, with £108m being knocked off its value. However, Deutsche Bank reissued its buy rating on Thursday, setting a target of 30% growth.
Banks have been among the worst affected, with Barclays down 28% and Royal Bank of Scotland down 21% since January 1.
However mining stocks, which endured a torrid 2015, have enjoyed a much better 2016 so far, albeit from a much reduced level. Randgold Resources is up 48% and Anglo American is up 24%.
Rob Gleeson, head of FE Research says: “This week the market horror show continued, with any hint of bad news being severely punished by investors, before the following day’s realisation that maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.
“Looking past the noise, the underlying trend of a slowing Chinese economy weighing on global growth has been understood and expected for some time – each new data point just strengthens or weakens that argument by a minute amount; hardly worth all the drama. The extreme case of a new financial crisis remains a remote possibility however.”
