One industry’s huge rally in share market

One sector has triumphed from a flat day on the Australian share market with two companies reporting double digit growth in their stock price.

The S&P/ASX200 closed up just 6.10 points or 0.1 per cent on Tuesday to end the day at 7,121.60 points.

Information technology was largely responsible for the index ending today on a high, albeit a small one.

Market analyst Tony Sycamore described today’s bump as a “win of sorts” after August trading has led to a fall of around 4 per cent across the market.

“Despite the quieter session at an index level, there was action aplenty under the hood after another eventful morning of earnings reports,” he said.

“The IT Sector was a standout surging 4.82 per cent following bumper earnings reports from two of its high profile members.”

Those were Altium Limited and Megaport Limited who both saw huge boosts to their share prices after both reporting earnings.

Software company Altium received an eye-watering 25.30 per cent boost to sell at $46.21 a share after it reported a 20.3 per cent increase in EBITDA to $US96 million and a 19.6 per cent lift in profit after tax to $US66.3 million.

Also helping its efforts on the ASX was Altium’s decision to raise its dividend by 14.9 per cent to $0.54 a share.

Cloud network company Megaport surged 16.94 per cent to $12.15 after reporting revenue growth of 40 per cent to $153.1 million.

Megaport also reported a “punchy” forward guidance according to Mr Sycamore, with EBITDA growth expected to grow year-on-year by 152 per cent to 182 per cent this financial year.

There was not only good news found in Tuesday’s round of reports, especially in retail, with the consumer discretionary sector down 0.88 per cent.

“At the other end of the retailer spectrum, Kogan plunged 11.21 per cent to $5.07 after it reported gross sales and revenue for the full year dropped by around 30 per cent due to soft market trading conditions,” Mr Sycamore said.

“The share price of Coles fell 7.08 per cent to $16.01 despite reporting a 4.8 per cent rise in full-year annual profit to $1.1 billion, with the market focusing instead on rising costs and customer theft.”

The miners faired reasonably well today with only BHP ending lower, down 0.71 per cent to $43.21 after reporting its full-year underlying profit fell 37 per cent to $US13.4 billion on lower commodity prices.

Rio Tinto ended the day with a 0.48 per cent boost to its share price at $105.32 and Fortescue also received a lift of 0.39 per cent to $20.50

The energy companies ended today on a sour note, surprisingly led by Woodside which fell 1.04 per cent to $38.06 despite reporting a 6 per cent jump in half-year profits and record production following its merger with BHP‘s petroleum business.

Santos followed, down 0.51 per cent to $7.80, as well as Origin which dropped 0.35 per cent to $8.66.

Meanwhile the big banks all received boosts today, with NAB securing the largest increase in share price of 1.31 to $27.93.

That was followed by Westpac, up 1.26 per cent to $20.88, ANZ up 0.25 per cent to $24.30 and CommBank up 0.22 to $98.67.