Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: Galp Drags the PSI to a Third Fall, Cajamar Walks Away From Banco CTT, Fitch Rules Tonight

Ten of Sixteen Rose and the PSI Still Fell, Because Galp Is Heavy

Friday in Lisbon was a lesson in index weighting. Ten of the PSI's sixteen constituents finished higher, six finished lower, and the index still went down: 9,388.77 points, off 0.14%, a third consecutive daily fall. Over the week the PSI lost about 0.45%, which ends a run of four straight weekly gains.

The reason sits in one stock. Galp Energia fell 2.29% to 20.52 euros and led the losers by a distance, on a day when crude eased back in international trading. Galp is roughly 13.9 billion euros of market capitalisation inside a sixteen-name index, so a 2.29% move there outweighs a lot of small green numbers elsewhere. The other two heavyweights in the red made it worse without doing much on their own: EDP Renováveis lost 0.45% to 13.14 euros and Banco Comercial Português lost 0.09% to 1.1485 euros, giving back a fraction of the 2.5% it put on in Thursday's session.

Retail carried the other side of the board. Jerónimo Martins, which owns Pingo Doce, led the gainers at plus 1.22% to 18.23 euros, and its rival Sonae, which owns Continente, added 0.50% to 2.025 euros. EDP rose 0.35% to 4.649 euros and did most of the work in limiting the damage. Behind them came Semapa at plus 0.48% to 20.85 euros, Corticeira Amorim at plus 0.43% to 7.05 euros, Navigator at plus 0.31% to 3.252 euros, REN at plus 0.29% to 3.505 euros, Altri at plus 0.21% to 4.685 euros, Ibersol at plus 0.20% to 10.22 euros and Mota-Engil at plus 0.08% to 4.776 euros. On the losing side, and this is the day's other story, CTT dropped 1.37% to 6.49 euros. Teixeira Duarte slipped 0.21% to 0.482 euros and NOS lost 0.44% to 4.936 euros.

Europe was split and mostly a shade better. The DAX closed up 0.35% at 26,094, the IBEX 35 up 0.56% at 20,112, the Euro Stoxx 50 up 0.45% at 6,408 and the CAC 40 up 0.05% at 8,291, while the FTSE MIB slipped 0.07% and London finished flat. What unsettled everyone was the American jobs report: US non-farm payrolls rose by 162,000 in August against a market expectation of about 56,000, which is the kind of miss that resets rate expectations rather than merely nudging them. By early evening in Lisbon Wall Street was lower, with the Dow off 0.47% at 53,431, the S&P 500 off 0.30% at 7,724.41 and the Nasdaq 100 off 0.26% at 29,405.

Yields Ease for a Second Day, and Fitch Rules on Portugal Tonight

Portugal's ten-year yield eased for a second session, down about 4 basis points to 3.67%. The German ten-year Bund gave up about a basis point to 3.34% and Spain's ten-year fell about 3 basis points to 3.77%. The Portuguese spread over the Bund therefore sits at roughly 33 basis points, unchanged in practice from Thursday, and Portugal continues to borrow ten basis points inside Spain.

The euro was almost still against the dollar. The European Central Bank's reference rate came in at 1.1622 dollars, from 1.1615 on Thursday, and the pair was trading around 1.1622 late in the afternoon. The strong American payrolls print pushed the dollar up but did not translate into much of a move by the close.

The event that matters lands after the close. Fitch Ratings publishes the second of its two 2026 reviews of Portuguese sovereign debt tonight. Fitch has had Portugal at A with a positive outlook since March, and the analysts Jornal de Negócios (Business Daily) canvassed this morning think an upgrade to A+ is available, which would match the level Standard and Poor's confirmed last week. The case rests on a debt ratio that keeps falling, helped in July by a single 2016 bond maturing and taking 8.3 billion euros off the long-term stock. The case against is simply that agencies often prefer to hold a positive outlook for one more cycle. A+ would put Portugal in the fifth investment-grade category.

On the money-market side, the most recent Euribor fixings on the tape are Thursday's, with Friday's not yet posted: twelve-month 3.109%, six-month 2.789% and three-month 2.655%. The twelve-month rate has now risen at five consecutive fixings, from 2.981% on 28 August through 3.003%, 3.029% and 3.068% to 3.109%. That is the rate that resets most Portuguese variable mortgages once a year, and it has already climbed past the 2.5% ceiling written into the state's savings certificates. The European Central Bank meets on 9 and 10 September and money markets fully price a 25 basis point increase to 2.5%.

Cajamar Walks Away From Banco CTT, and the Postal Group Is Back Where It Started

The session's corporate news arrived twelve minutes before the close and explains CTT's 1.37% fall. CTT and BCC Grupo Cooperativo Cajamar, the Spanish cooperative banking group, have ended their talks over a potential acquisition of Banco CTT without reaching agreement, Bloomberg reported. There is no deal and no price.

The approach was never a formal process. CTT has confirmed it received an unsolicited, non-binding approach for the bank and said at the time that it was too early to know whether anything would come of it. What the interest did do was start CTT working with BNP Paribas earlier this year to explore options for its banking arm, and the group led by Guy Pacheco also hired Rothschild to weigh the possibilities. With the Spanish buyer gone, CTT says it will keep evaluating strategic options for Banco CTT while investing in customer growth and digital capability, which is a polite way of saying the file stays open.

Two reference points frame what Banco CTT might be worth. In 2022 CTT sold an 8.7% stake in the bank to the insurer Tranquilidade Generali in a transaction that valued it at 290 million euros. And earlier this year the group's then chief executive, João Bento, told ECO that a spin-off followed by a stock market listing was on the table, with the blunt observation that "we are not the ideal shareholder for a bank". His argument was structural: having the bank inside the postal group makes CTT harder for investors and analysts to value. This is also the second Iberian bank to look at Banco CTT and decline in eighteen months, after Bankinter's chief executive Gloria Ortiz ruled out a bid in April. CTT's own half-year numbers, with profit down 41.6% to 12.9 million euros, are part of why the question of what to do with the bank keeps coming back.

The State Will Squeeze Both TAP Bidders Before It Picks One

The government broke from the expected script on TAP. After reading the Parpública report on the binding bids, the normal next step would have been to select one candidate and negotiate with it. Instead, the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, said after Friday's Council of Ministers that the state will open a final negotiation phase with both Air France-KLM and Lufthansa at once, and only then choose which one goes into what he called the "very final" negotiation.

His reasoning was that the two offers for 44.9% of the airline are different in content but so close in overall evaluation that it is worth pushing both. "The proposals have an overall evaluation so close, even being different, that they justify this effort of final negotiation with both, so that afterwards, on the basis of improved proposals, we can take the decision on the single candidate," he said. The phase will run "weeks, not months". Asked whether Parpública's report named a favourite, he declined to say, citing the need to preserve the state's negotiating position. He did make clear that price is not the only criterion: routes, the diaspora and the industrial project all count.

The two groups filed their binding bids on 29 July, and Parpública delivered its assessment on Tuesday. A further 5% is reserved for TAP employees, and the winning bidder may take up whatever the workers do not subscribe. Air France-KLM said on Friday that it awaits the new round "with expectation". The backdrop is not flattering: TAP reported a net loss of 99.2 million euros for the first half, 40% worse than a year earlier, and the airline's chief executive is running it twenty months past the end of his mandate. Prime Minister Luís Montenegro has said the sale should recover the 3.2 billion euros the state put in.

Three More Cents Off the Fuel Tax, and Diesel Still Reaches 2.12 Euros on Monday

Crude finished the week hard. Brent traded around 95.30 dollars a barrel on Friday, down 0.14% on the day but up about 20% over the past month and about 46% on a year ago, and the American benchmark was up nearly 9% across the week, its strongest week since mid-July. The driver is the resumption of United States strikes on Iran after roughly a month of calm, Iranian retaliation against shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and traffic through the strait falling to six commodity vessels on Wednesday against a ten-day average close to thirteen.

That feeds straight into Portuguese pumps on Monday, and the government moved to soften it. Leitão Amaro said the state will deepen the discount on the Imposto sobre os Produtos Petrolíferos (Tax on Petroleum Products) by "approximately three cents" a litre, slightly more on diesel than on petrol, with VAT included. Even so, diesel is expected to rise 10.5 cents to about 2.124 euros a litre and 95-octane petrol 8.5 cents to about 2.107 euros. The final weekly average only closes at the end of the day and can still move with international quotations, and the price on any given forecourt depends on the brand and the location.

The cumulative discount now runs to 23 cents a litre on both fuels against what drivers would pay with no support at all, and the minister put the total cost of the measures adopted since the attacks on Iran began at more than 300 million euros, counting the fuel-tax discount, the ten-cent professional diesel support and the subsidised gas cylinder. It is a mechanism that has been widened and clawed back repeatedly through the summer, and this is the widening half of the cycle.

The State's Own AI Model Goes Looking for the Newsrooms' Archives

The same Council of Ministers produced the week's most interesting technology item. The government will shortly open talks with Portuguese media companies about agreed access to their more recent archives, in order to train the next phase of Amália, the state's own Portuguese-language artificial intelligence model. Leitão Amaro framed it as Portugal setting an example "in the relationship between the national model and the media companies, which often, as is known, raise concerns about the use of their archives".

He gave no timetable and no indication of what the terms might be, which is the part publishers will notice, because the underlying dispute across Europe is about copyrighted material being used for training without permission or payment. Alongside the media archives, the government wants to draw on public collections: the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library), the Cinemateca (National Film Archive), and state archives and museums.

Amália itself moves into a new phase with more training and more capacity, gaining the ability to interpret text, audio and images rather than text alone. The stated aim is that it stops being a prototype and gets embedded in the delivery of public services through the Gov.pt app, helping with processes such as renewing a Cartão de Cidadão (Citizen Card). Total investment in the model now stands at seven million euros, on top of more than twelve million euros of synergies from existing investment in the Deucalion and MareNostrum 5 supercomputers. That is up from the 1.5 million euros added in July, and the model is already deployed in the Navy.

Also Moving: EDP's Chief on Data Centres, an Auto-Parts Sale, the Bessa Changes Hands

EDP's chief executive sets a condition on data centres. Miguel Stilwell d'Andrade used a LinkedIn post on Friday to argue that Portugal and Spain have to define the environmental, labour and financial terms for hosting data centres "clearly and in advance", or the investment goes elsewhere. Europe, he wrote, is "very, very far behind" the United States and China on computing capacity, and the vulnerability that creates in data mirrors the one Europe already learned about in imported energy. His caveat was as pointed as his pitch: setting the terms early "does not mean accepting every project or lowering our ambitions", and there is room to insist on qualified employment, tax revenue, local contracting, extra renewable generation and storage. It is a notably different register from the fights already running over seawater at Sines and electricity at Abrantes.

A Portuguese auto-parts subsidiary changes owner. Plasman Europe, the Swedish arm of the Plasman group, has sold 100% of the share capital of Plasman Portugal to the American company JAC Products, Inc. Abreu Advogados acted for the seller on all Portuguese-law aspects of the deal, including a corporate and equity restructuring of the target carried out beforehand, vendor due diligence, and the sale and purchase agreement, with merger-control analysis included. Terms were not disclosed. It is a small transaction in a sector that has had a hard year, with Portuguese vehicle output at a four-year low.

A Lisbon property group bids 33 million euros for the Estádio do Bessa. After creditors rejected a 25.35 million euro offer made through an online auction for Boavista's stadium and its sports complex, a Lisbon-based real estate group has put in a proposal that clears the minimum price. It now sits with the club's insolvency administrator and needs creditor approval. The court in Vila Nova de Gaia cleared the auction at 31 million euros in May, with roughly 150 million euros owed and Sacyr the lead creditor.

Continente starts buying advertising inside ChatGPT. Sonae's grocery chain has become one of the first Portuguese brands to place ads in OpenAI's chatbot, through its media agency Arena Media. ChatGPT opened to advertising in Europe, Portugal included, on 24 August. Continente's placements push promotional campaigns, own-brand products and seasonal lines, and currently surface on searches around home solutions. The ads appear at the end of responses, labelled and separated from the generated text; OpenAI says advertisers get no access to user conversations and the ads do not influence answers. Continente holds 27.6% of the Portuguese grocery market.

The Weekend and Monday

Fitch's verdict on Portugal lands tonight after the European close, so it will be Monday's open that prices it either way; OPEC+ meets on Sunday and is expected to leave October output policy unchanged, which leaves Galp and the pump prices hostage to the Strait of Hormuz rather than to the cartel, and Monday morning brings the confirmed diesel and petrol increases along with a Lisbon market that has now fallen three sessions running.