Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: Five Green Names Lift the PSI, Mota-Engil Wins Its First Exxon Contract, Goldman Warns on 120 Dollar Oil

Lisbon reopened after three consecutive falls and reversed them, in the most lopsided way an index can. Only five of the PSI's sixteen constituents finished higher. The index still gained 0.32%, because four of those five are the four largest companies on the board. Elsewhere: Mota-Engil signed its first contract for ExxonMobil in Mozambique, Goldman Sachs told clients that crude could go back through 120 dollars a barrel, and European bond markets sold off without changing Portugal's position within them by a single basis point.

Five Stocks Rose and the Index Rose With Them, Because They Were the Right Five

The PSI closed at 9,419.13 points, up 30.36 points or 0.32%. It opened at 9,409.11, which was also its low for the day, ran as high as 9,442.13, and ended above Friday's 9,388.77 close. That leaves it about 1.4% below the 9,550.72 top of its 52-week range, whose floor is 7,639.48. The broader PSI Geral did better still, up 0.59% to 6,395.63.

Friday was a lesson in index weighting and Monday was the same lesson read backwards. On Friday ten of the sixteen constituents rose and the index fell anyway, because Galp Energia alone was heavy enough to outweigh them. Today five rose, one was unchanged, ten fell, and the index went up, because the five that rose included EDP, Banco Comercial Português, EDP Renováveis and Galp Energia. Those four carry roughly 65.05 billion euros of market capitalisation between them, against about 29.1 billion euros for the other twelve names combined. Here is the whole board, sorted by the day's move:

Two of the gains were driven by research notes published during the session, pulling in opposite directions on the same tape. Alantra Equities raised its target price on Banco Comercial Português by ten cents and kept its recommendation at buy; the shares rose 0.78% to 1.1575 euros, closing above the symbolic 1.15 euro line and at their highest level in more than eleven years. That is the same stock whose free float has been shadowed all year by the question of what happens if Fosun sells its stake, and it is the only listed bank left in Lisbon.

AlphaValue went the other way on Galp Energia, cutting its target price while leaving its recommendation at reduce, the house equivalent of sell. Galp rose 0.97% to 20.72 euros regardless, carried by crude, and it remains the best performing stock on the Lisbon exchange since the start of the year. EDP Renováveis led the whole board at plus 2.13% to 13.42 euros, its best session in weeks, in a year when the renewables arm has been running a doubled half-year profit carried by the United States against a domestic pipeline where the 2021 floating solar auction has all but collapsed.

The heaviest drag was CTT, down 1.54% to 6.39 euros and at one point more than 3% lower, working through the news that talks to sell Banco CTT to Spain's Cajamar ended without agreement, which Bloomberg reported after Friday's close. Ibersol led the falls at minus 2.25%. Jerónimo Martins was the only heavyweight in the red, off 0.66% to 18.11 euros. Europe was genuinely split rather than uniformly firm: the CAC 40 rose 0.33% to 8,306.15, the AEX 0.17% and the Euronext 100 0.34%, while the DAX fell 0.15% to 26,006.53, the IBEX 35 0.14% to 20,021.80 and the FTSE 100 0.08%. Frankfurt and Madrid were reacting in part to the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) winning the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on a record result without an absolute majority, which analysts read as a wait-and-see moment for the governing capacity of Friedrich Merz's coalition rather than a reason to sell today. Wall Street was lower through the Lisbon evening, with the S&P 500 at 7,702.35 and off 0.21%, the Dow at 53,080 and off 0.63%, and the Nasdaq 100 at 29,435 and off 0.37%.

Mota-Engil Takes Its First ExxonMobil Work in Mozambique, at 207 Million Dollars

Mota-Engil told the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (Securities Market Commission) this morning that its subsidiary Mota-Engil África has signed a contract worth 207 million dollars, in a consortium with the Italian group Bonatti Spa on a fifty-fifty basis, to develop the early works for Area 4 of the Mozambique Rovuma Ventures project. Area 4 is led by ExxonMobil and sits on the Afungi peninsula in Cabo Delgado, in the far north of Mozambique. It is the first work the Portuguese group has taken for ExxonMobil on the Mozambican liquefied natural gas complex.

Early works is a contractor's term for everything that has to exist before the plant itself can be built: site clearance, roads, camps, drainage, power and the laydown areas that a project of this size runs on. It is not the headline construction package, and that is precisely why it matters commercially. A contractor that does the enabling works is on site, mobilised and known to the client when the far larger engineering packages are awarded. The share price took the point, rising 0.80% to 4.814 euros.

The contract also lands in a country where Mota-Engil's shareholders have watched a Portuguese peer struggle. Galp Energia holds an interest in the same Rovuma basin and has spent this year escalating a 150 million euro Mozambican tax dispute to World Bank arbitration. Cabo Delgado is also the province whose insurgency stalled the wider Mozambique LNG development for years. Against that, this is a construction group with a visibly widening order book: it won in Congo in August, took 185 million euros of Mexican urban mobility work in July, and spun its African mining arm into a standalone company last month to open it to outside investors. Africa is where this company makes its margin, and today it added a client it did not previously have.

Goldman Sachs Puts 120 Dollar Oil Back on the Table

Goldman Sachs warned clients this morning that crude could climb back above 120 dollars a barrel if attacks on shipping in the Middle East increase in number. The bank's alternative case is 80 dollars, which is where it sees the price going if exports from the region normalise. That is a 40 dollar spread on a single geopolitical variable, and it is an honest way of saying that nobody is pricing the oil market on supply and demand at the moment.

The day's news flow ran toward the first case rather than the second. Saudi Aramco refineries near the Yemeni border were attacked again, and Iran signalled that it will announce a new restricted zone in the Gulf together with a designated corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Brent rose 0.92% to 97.17 dollars a barrel and West Texas Intermediate 1.38% to 92.74 dollars. Brent is up 10.77% over the past month and 47.18% against this time last year. Gold, unusually for a day like this, fell.

For Portugal the transmission mechanism is not subtle. Crude at these levels is why diesel set an all-time record at Portuguese pumps this week despite a deepened state rebate, and fuel did almost all the work in taking Portuguese inflation back to 3.3% in August. Motorists staged a go-slow protest outside Galp's refinery today over the price at the pump. Galp itself is the listed company most exposed in both directions: it owns Portugal's only refinery, at Sines, and is already facing a revived windfall levy on the profits a high crude price generates. A cartel that declined on Sunday to add any barrels in October is the third leg of the same structure.

Europe Sold Bonds and Portugal's Spread Did Not Move

Every major euro-area sovereign sold off today, and the interesting thing is how little the selling rearranged anybody. Portugal's ten-year yield rose five basis points to 3.72%. The German Bund rose five basis points to 3.39%, leaving the spread at roughly 33 basis points, exactly where it stood on Friday. Spain rose six basis points to 3.83%, Greece five to 4.05%, Italy seven to 4.22% and France four to 4.25%. Portugal is financing itself about eleven basis points inside Spain, 33 inside Greece, 50 inside Italy and 53 inside France, and it has now held those relative positions through Friday night's Fitch upgrade to A+ and through a global rates day that went the wrong way.

That is a matter of some practical importance on Wednesday. The Agência de Gestão da Tesouraria e da Dívida Pública (Treasury and Public Debt Management Agency), known as the IGCP, holds three Obrigações do Tesouro (Treasury Bond) auctions at 10:30 that morning, seeking an indicative 1,500 million to 1,750 million euros across lines maturing on 15 February 2030, 20 October 2034 and 15 June 2035. It is the first primary-market test of the new rating, and it falls on the opening day of the European Central Bank's Governing Council meeting in Berlin, hosted by the Deutsche Bundesbank, with the decision and press conference following on Thursday 10 September. The deposit facility rate has stood at 2.25% since 17 June, the main refinancing rate at 2.40% and marginal lending at 2.65%; euro-area inflation rose to 3.3% in August from 2.9% in July, and the market has priced a further quarter-point rise.

The Euribor panel has been pricing it for a fortnight. The most recent fixings published are Friday's: twelve months at 3.108%, six months at 2.794%, three months at 2.679%, one month at 2.364% and one week at 2.154%. The three-month rate has added almost nine basis points in four sessions and the one-month rate almost eleven, which is where a rate expectation shows up before it shows up anywhere else. The twelve-month rate slipped by a thousandth of a point from Thursday's 3.109%, ending a five-session run of increases, and it remains well above the 2.5% ceiling written into the state savings certificates, which is the point at which Portuguese savers stop sharing in the rise while Portuguese mortgage holders keep paying for it.

On the currency, there is nothing to report and that is itself worth reporting. The European Central Bank's reference rate for the euro against the dollar was 1.1622 today, identical to Friday's 1.1622 to four decimal places, on a day when bonds moved, oil moved and a German state election was being read for federal implications. The Japanese yen was the mover instead, pushing past the level that triggered intervention in August and reaching seven-month highs.

Thirty-One Deep Tech Projects Start on Tuesday, Chosen From Ninety-Eight

The Ministério da Economia e Coesão Territorial (Ministry of the Economy and Territorial Cohesion) announced today that the first edition of Tech Foundry Portugal, Deep Tech Edition, has selected 31 scientific and technological projects from 98 applications. The programme begins on Tuesday and runs for three months, ending with a Demo Day in Porto on 15 December. It was originally advertised as a four-month programme when applications opened, and has been compressed by a month.

The selected cohort is weighted toward the slow, capital-hungry end of the technology spectrum, which is the entire point of the label. Six projects are in health and six in biotechnology. Five are in artificial intelligence and five in the climate and energy transition. The remainder are spread across advanced materials and nanotechnology, dual-use technologies with defence applications, robotics and autonomous systems including drones, and space and aeronautics. Just under half are still at proof-of-concept stage, while 39% have tested their technology in environments close to real-world application.

The programme is run by Startup Portugal with the French consultancy Hello Tomorrow and Porto Business School, supported by Porto city council, and it plugs participants into Hello Tomorrow's network of more than 5,000 startups and roughly 1,300 specialist deep tech investors. The stated aim is to convert Portuguese academic research into companies. The Secretary of State for the Economy, João Rui Ferreira, framed it as a cultural intervention as much as a commercial one, saying the goal is a culture "in which scientists, teachers and students see the market not as a departure from the scientific mission, but as one of the ways in which science can serve society".

That framing is worth taking seriously, because it is the gap Portugal keeps failing to close. The country has built a plausible early-stage funding layer, from Portugal Ventures writing cheques into regional startups to a NATO DIANA acceleration node in Coimbra and a European Space Agency incubator in Oeiras. What it has struggled to produce is the step from a well-funded laboratory result to a company with customers. Three months of acceleration will not settle that, but the sector mix here, with defence and space sitting alongside biotech, tracks where the money has actually been moving: a Cantanhede metalworker committed two million euros to a fourth production hall this morning on the strength of defence orders alone.

Also on the Tape: Benavente Zones 32 Hectares, and UBS Calls Portugal Europe's Best Economy

Benavente prices the airport before it is built. The Câmara Municipal de Benavente (Benavente municipal council) told Lusa that it intends to develop a business park of about 32 hectares tied to the future Aeroporto Luís de Camões, estimating that the firms installed there could generate an aggregate turnover above 100 million euros in each municipal term once the site is fully occupied. The area, formally the fourth Unidade Operativa de Planeamento e Gestão (operational planning and management unit), is split across three execution units at Carrascal, Carrascal e Foros and Vale de Gaio, and is zoned for commerce, industry, services, innovation, science and technology, with hazardous waste and polluting activities excluded. One large biofuels company is already in the process of installing, and the council reports approaches from technology, science, defence industry and services firms. The council's reasoning is openly defensive: it wants to capture investment drawn by the airport rather than watch neighbouring municipalities absorb it. The clock is real, too. The site has until 18 December 2028, extendable by one year, and if the projects do not go ahead the land reverts to its original rustic classification. Given that ANA has only just filed the 5,000-page environmental study for an airport targeted to open in 2035, and that the state is still working through the 8.5 billion euro construction blueprint, that is a municipal council placing a bet several years ahead of the infrastructure.

UBS puts Portugal at the top of its European table. Burkhard Varnholt, senior financial markets advisor at UBS Global Wealth, in Lisbon for a client meeting, told Jornal de Negócios that the most successful economy in Europe is the Portuguese one, ahead of Spain, Poland, Greece and Italy, with Germany and France "moving very slowly". His read on the asset classes was blunter still: euro-area corporate profits rose 22% this quarter, equity markets are rising, and investors "are not buying GDP, they are buying company profits", while the euro-area bond market is simply stalled. It is a wealth manager's soundbite delivered to wealth management clients, and it should be discounted accordingly. It is also consistent with the domestic data: Portugal added jobs faster than any other EU country last quarter, with a record 5.49 million people in work.

Two deals and a job cut. The Spanish law firm Pérez-Llorca advised the lending syndicate on the financing behind Alfana Investment Management's purchase of the Fórum Algarve shopping centre in Faro, the fund's first acquisition outside Spain at 130 million euros; the centre is expected to join the Rivoli Retail portfolio. Elsewhere in Europe, Jaguar Land Rover said it will cut 4,000 jobs, a reminder that the automotive restructuring cycle that has run through Portugal's own plants is not finished.

Tuesday

The index goes into Tuesday depending on the same four names that carried it today, and on a crude price that two of them need to keep moving in opposite directions. Watch whether Banco Comercial Português can hold above 1.15 euros now that it has closed there for the first time in eleven years, because an eleven-year high in the second-largest constituent tends to attract either momentum or profit-taking rather than indifference. The real event is not on the equity screen: Wednesday's Treasury auction and the opening of the European Central Bank's meeting are 36 hours away, and the thing to watch in the meantime is the 33 basis point spread rather than the 3.72% yield. If the A+ is worth cash rather than credit, that is where it shows up, and it has until Wednesday morning to prove it. In parliament, the thirty-seventh censure motion in the history of Portuguese democracy reaches the floor.