European equities opened higher on Monday underpinned by rallies in the mining and automobile sectors and reflecting a stock surge in Asia after incumbent Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his ruling coalition secured a landslide victory in elections held on Sunday.
The Japanese electoral win puts Abe in a better position to assess if and when to put constitutional revisions to the archipelago’s population in a referendum and to push through his economic agenda, sometimes refereed to as “Abenomics”.
In other macro-economic news, the UK economic outlook posted its weakest reading in four years, according to a survey conducted by private research company Markit.
Sentiment regarding expected activity levels over the next 12 months remained positive overall, but ebbed to the weakest in four years, according to the June Markit Business Outlook for which the majority of responses were received before the outcome of Britain’s referendum on continued membership in the European Union was announced.
Broken down by sector, business expectations were weakest in the construction sector, followed by services, where the outlook was the most subdued in four years. Manufacturers were as confident as they had been in February regarding future output, the report added.
In equities, miners led the gainers on London’s FTSE 100 Index, with Glencore, Anglo American and Fresnillo up by 5.1%, 4.5% and 2.1%, respectively. Royal Bank of Scotland was 2.4% higher.
In Frankfurt’s DAX, steel production company ThyssenKrupp advanced 3.8%, car-makers Volkswagen and Daimler were 3.4% and 2.3%, respectively, while electricity and natural gas supplier RWE was up by 3.2%. And, on Paris’ CAC-40, Swiss building materials manufacturer LafargeHolcim was 2.4% higher, French electricity and distribution company Schneider Electric was up by 2.2% and Credit Agricole, a French banking group, was 1.0% higher.
The Stoxx 600 Index was 0.64% higher, the FTSE 100 was up by 0.62%, the DAX was 1.37% higher and the CAC-40 was up by 1.03%.
