The Redux Global ICT 100 Index (‘R-100’) slipped back from the record high registered in September to close down 3.5% in the October trading month. From the end-September high of 1050.60, it tumbled back to 1013.92 (28 October).

Losses were to be found more or less across the board. Europe was down 4.25%; North America down 2.3%; Japan and Asia dropped by 2.3%.The global decline is the worst since January 2005, with the R-100 now at its lowest level since August of this year.

Few companies managed to buck the downward trend. Among those in significantly positive territory in Europe were TDC of Denmark and O2 of the UK (still subject to takeover speculation), TeliaSonera and Swisscom. In the US, Avaya, Oracle, IBM, Google, Qualcomm and Yahoo! could smile. Fujitsu, Matsushita and KDDI registered modest gains in Asia.

There were few dramatic fallers among the rest of the R-100, who trended modestly downwards, although Samsung, Singapore Telecom, NTT of Japan, Sun Microsystems, Intel, eBay, Cisco, Amazon, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Alcatel, France Telecom, Siemens, Telecom Italia, Ericsson and Vodafone all took hefty chunks out of the R-100’s overall market cap. It fell from US$3,568bn at the end of September to a mere US$3,443bn on 28 October. What the heck, it's only a hundred million dollars plus change.

Triumph of hope over experience
On a brighter note, the R-100 outperformed the UK’s FTSE-100 (-5% in the same period) and the DAX (-4.3%), but not the tech-weighted NASDAQ (-2.8%) or the Dow (-1.6%) or the Nikkei (-1.6%). This could be interpreted as a demonstration that European shares actually outperformed their North American and Asian counterparts when compared to their regional stock markets. .

As of 28 October, the R-100 was more than 4% up on a year ago.
Jim Chalmers