Staff reporters
Updated ,first published
The Australian sharemarket jumped in early trade, tracking gains on Wall Street, where investors pivoted back from artificial-intelligence weariness to focus on the upsides of the AI boom.
A flurry of corporate news also buoyed local investor sentiment: Woolworths, the nation’s biggest supermarket chain, rallied after raising its interim dividend by 15.4 per cent and saying trading has been strong at its Australian supermarkets. Software giant WiseTech Global advanced after saying it will slash almost a third of its staff as it turns to AI for its software development. And Fortescue Metals paced gains in mining stocks after reporting record iron ore shipments.
The S&P/ASX 200 climbed 76.80 points, or 0.8 per cent, to 9099.10 as of 10.54am AEDT, with consumer staples and tech stocks leading the gains. The gains come after a flat finish on Tuesday. The Australian dollar was trading at US70.61¢ at 11.23am AEDT.
Woolworths shares soared 9.2 per cent, sending consumer staples higher, after revealing a solid set of half-year results. The supermarket giant’s total sales lifted 3.4 per cent to $37.1 billion, helping it push operating earnings up 14.4 per cent to $1.66 billion. Australian food sales from its supermarket stores gained 3.6 per cent to $1.5 billion. The company announced a fully franked interim dividend of 45 cents per share, a 15.4 per cent increase on last year.
WiseTech shares jumped 7.4 per cent after the logistics software maker said it will cut roughly 2000 staff over the next two years as chief executive Zubin Appoo bets the company’s future on artificial intelligence. The restructure comes amid a steep sell-off across traditional software companies, from Atlassian to Adobe, driven by fears that AI-powered coding tools will allow upstarts to rapidly replicate services that took incumbents years to build.
“The era of manually writing code as the core act of engineering is over,” Appoo declared on Wednesday, calling AI “the most significant shift in decades” for software development.
Other tech stocks also advanced, tracking their peers’ gains in the US, with accounting software maker Xero up 3.8 per cent, AI data centre operator Next DC rising 2.3 per cent and family tracking app Life360 gaining 5.9 per cent.
In the mining sector, Fortescue shares rose 2.6 per cent after the iron ore miner said shipments of the key steelmaking ingredient reached their highest level ever at 100.2 million tonnes in the December half. The company reported a net profit of $US1.9 billion ($2.7 billion) and declared a fully franked interim dividend of 62c per share, 24 per cent higher than the previous year.
Fortescue Metals boss Dino Otranto said the company’s decarbonisation push was lowering its operating costs. “The more diesel we eliminate, the less exposure we have to price volatility, and the stronger and more predictable our margins become,” he said.
Other miners also advanced. BHP gained 2.5 per cent to trade above $56, a fresh record high. Rio Tinto added 1.6 per cent and gold miners Northern Star Resources and Evolution Mining gained 2.7 per cent and 3.8 per cent, respectively.
The key banking sector, which makes up a third of the ASX, was also stronger. CBA, the nation’s biggest lender, rose 0.9 per cent. National Australia Bank added 1 per cent, Westpac gained 1.2 per cent and ANZ rose 0.6 per cent.
Shares in gaming giant Tabcorp soared as much as 20 per cent to a high of $1.02, after it reported underlying earnings (earnings before interest and tax) rose 19 per cent to $110 million for the December half year. Cost-cutting efforts boosted the bottom line despite revenue increasing only slightly for the December half year to $1.34 billion.
Tabcorp’s result was hampered by “historically low” betting yields in the high turnover September to November period, which covers the AFL and NRL finals series and spring racing carnival, due to an unusually high number of favorites winning.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 climbed 0.8 per cent overnight and recovered nearly three-quarters of its sharp drop from the day before. The Dow Jones added 0.8 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1 per cent.
The gains came after investors piled back into AI-related stocks ahead of Nvidia’s results, scheduled to be published after Wednesday’s closing bell in New York (Thursday morning AEDT).
Advanced Micro Devices helped lead the US market and rallied 8.8 per cent after announcing a multiyear deal where it will supply chips to Meta Platforms to help power its AI ambitions. Under the agreement, Meta also got the right to buy up to 160 million shares of AMD stock for 1 US cent each, depending in part on how many chips Meta ultimately buys. The series of transactions will be worth “double-digit billions” of dollars per gigawatt, according to AMD boss Lisa Su.
It’s a reminder of the excitement that built in recent years about the billions of dollars pouring into AI. It also helped produce a sharp turnaround for the market from the prior day, when worries about the potential downsides of AI shook Wall Street, particularly companies and industries that investors fear could be made obsolete. Industries as far flung as software and financial services have recently seen investors suddenly and aggressively punish them for potentially being under threat.
IBM rose 2.7 per cent to recover some of its 13.1 per cent drop from Monday, which was its worst since 2000. Nvidia was up 0.7 per cent.
Outside of AI worries, big US companies continued to report mostly better profits for the end of 2025 than analysts expected.
Keysight Technologies rallied 23.1 per cent for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after topping analysts’ expectations for profit in the latest quarter.
With AP, Bloomberg
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
