Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Flat, Mota-Engil Wins Congo and Loses Oiã-Soure, Revolut Picks Portugal

A Fifth Straight Gain, Won by Less Than a Point

The PSI (Portuguese Stock Index) closed Wednesday, 26 August, at 9,446.39 points. That is a rise of 0.95 points, or 0.01%, which technically extends the winning run to five sessions and in practice means nothing moved at all. The index opened at 9,445.23, ran up to 9,468.75, slipped to a low of 9,409.63 and came back to finish almost exactly where it started. It sits 0.74% below the 52-week peak of 9,516.43.

Seven of the sixteen members rose, eight fell and CTT was unchanged at €6.555. On a day this quiet the interesting thing is not the direction but the sorting, because the market split cleanly along sector lines rather than randomly.

Everything that generates or moves electricity went up. EDP Renováveis (EDP Renewables) added 0.29% to €13.81, EDP 0.28% to €4.698 and REN, or Redes Energéticas Nacionais (National Energy Networks), 0.14% to €3.565. That is a second consecutive session in which the EDP complex has done the index's work for it. Ibersol, the restaurant operator, took the day's top spot with 0.78% to €10.38, and BCP, or Banco Comercial Português, rose 0.27% to €1.1120 on more than 30 million shares, by far the heaviest volume on the board and a price the Lisbon market reads as close to an eleven-year high. NOS gained 0.28% to €4.956 and Sonae 0.25% to €2.0250.

Everything made of trees went down. Corticeira Amorim, the cork group, was the worst performer at minus 0.85% to €7.00; Semapa fell 0.48% to €20.65, Navigator 0.43% to €3.260 and Altri 0.42% to €4.725. The paper and pulp complex moving together in a single direction is normal enough, but four names from the same forestry chain occupying four of the eight declining slots is what turned a positive breadth reading into a flat index.

Galp Energia lost 0.61% to €21.15, and the reason arrived from the Gulf rather than from Lisbon. Brent, the European crude benchmark, sold off through the Portuguese session on reports that Iran and Oman had reached partial agreement on a temporary shipping route and revenue-sharing arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz, touching a low near $84.59 a barrel before recovering most of the fall after the Lisbon close to trade around $88. Galp has now given back ground on two consecutive days without doing anything like matching crude's swings, which is the same pattern we flagged on Tuesday: the market is treating this as a war premium unwinding, not a demand problem.

Mota-Engil eased 0.43% to €4.640, handing back a small slice of Tuesday's 3.46% jump. Jerónimo Martins fell 0.27% to €18.16 and Teixeira Duarte 0.42% to €0.4780.

Europe was uniformly, unexcitingly higher. The Euro Stoxx 50 rose 0.30%, Milan 0.34%, Paris 0.27%, Frankfurt 0.19% and Madrid 0.05%; London was the only major market to fall, and only by 0.07%. Lisbon underperformed all of them except London, which after four sessions of leading the pack is less a reversal than a pause.

Mota-Engil Takes a Thousand Kilometres in Congo and Is Shown the Door at Oiã to Soure

The Porto builder had the best and worst news of any Portuguese company today, and both arrived on railways.

In Kinshasa, Mota-Engil África signed a thirty-year concession over roughly a thousand kilometres of the Democratic Republic of Congo's stretch of the Lobito Corridor, the Dilolo to Sakania line. The contract covers operation, modernisation, rehabilitation and maintenance, and Jornal de Negócios puts the investment at more than €1.5 billion across the term. The line connects the mines of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga, which is to say much of the world's accessible cobalt and a serious share of its copper, to the Angolan network and from there to the Atlantic at the Port of Lobito. Mota-Engil already sits inside the consortium running the Angolan half, so this closes the corridor end to end under one commercial roof.

The financing is the part worth watching. The United States International Development Finance Corporation has signed a letter of interest covering up to $1 billion toward the project, which places a Portuguese mid-cap at the centre of an American strategy to move critical minerals to Western markets without routing them through China. That is an unusual position for a company of Mota-Engil's size, and it follows a year in which the group has been steadily raising the profile of its African business: it spun its African mining arm into a standalone company on 17 August, explicitly to make room for outside investors. We looked at the scale of the group's Congolese pipeline in June, when Portugal's entire goods trade with the DRC was worth a €7.3 million surplus while Mota-Engil alone was carrying €1.1 billion of work there. Today's signature roughly doubles that.

Then, at 16:58, half an hour after the Lisbon close, Jornal de Negócios reported the other half. The jury assessing the tender for the Oiã to Soure section of the Lisbon to Porto high-speed line has recommended, in its preliminary report, that the contract go to the consortium of Sacyr Somague Concessões, DST 2gether and Alberto Couto Alves, and that Lusolav III, the grouping led by Mota-Engil, be excluded outright.

This is the second of the line's public-private partnerships, and the two consortiums have been circling each other since July. The Sacyr grouping bid €2,038 million on the engineering, procurement and construction component against Lusolav's €2.3 billion, and price carries 80% of the award weighting, so on the arithmetic alone the outcome was never in much doubt; we covered that gap when it emerged in mid-July. What Lusolav had been arguing since is that its rival's proposal breached the tender's own cost ceiling around Coimbra by €186 million, an objection that gained weight on 14 August when the frontrunner conceded it had left out the four-track section the specification required. The jury has now looked at both arguments and come down against Mota-Engil on both counts.

A preliminary report is not an award. It opens the prior-hearing window, and a consortium that has spent six weeks building a technical case against its rival is unlikely to walk away from it quietly, which means the €584 million train order and the sections already cleared by environmental regulators now sit behind a contest that could take months. Investors, for what it is worth, marked the shares down less than half a percent, and they did so before the Oiã to Soure story broke. Tomorrow's session gets to price both pieces of news at once.

Revolut Puts Portugal in the First Three Countries for Its Euro Stablecoin

Revolut began rolling out EURR, its first euro-denominated stablecoin, on Wednesday, and Portugal is one of exactly three launch markets alongside Denmark and Poland.

The token is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought last year, and lives inside the Revolut app, where eligible customers can move between euros and crypto-assets without leaving the interface. It is designed to hold a fixed value of one euro, is backed by reserves administered under European regulatory requirements, and is supported across several blockchains and external wallets. Revolut has said the phased rollout will extend to the rest of the European Economic Area later this year, subject to operational and regulatory readiness, and that EURR is "only the first step" toward a family of Revolut stablecoins in other currencies.

Portugal's inclusion is not sentiment. Revolut counts 2.3 million clients here and claims to be the country's third-largest bank by customer numbers, and it is building a Matosinhos sales hub on a €30 million commitment. Denmark, Poland and Portugal were picked on market size, which tells you how large Revolut's Portuguese base has become relative to the country.

The regulatory ground was laid earlier this year. Portugal brought crypto-assets fully under the European Union's MiCA rulebook on 1 July, splitting supervision between the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) and the CMVM, the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (Securities Market Commission). Bison Bank issued the first MiCA-regulated euro and dollar stablecoin pair from a Portuguese bank in May, though inside a closed banks-only system. What arrives today is different in kind: a retail euro stablecoin, in a consumer app, on a customer base measured in millions. Whether that makes euro stablecoins useful to ordinary Portuguese customers or merely available to them is a question the next twelve months will answer, but the distribution problem that has held European stablecoins back has just been solved for one of them.

Two Data Centres in Abrantes Would Draw Nineteen Times What the Whole Council Uses

Quercus, the environmental association, published an assessment on Wednesday of the two data centres planned for the council of Abrantes, and the electricity arithmetic is the whole story.

The first, the Hyperion project, sits near the Alvega roundabout: 151,000 square metres of footprint, 287,000 square metres of construction, 20 MW of load and a 200 MVA grid connection, currently in licensing and targeted at 2029. The second, EDC ONE, would occupy the site of the decommissioned Pego thermoelectric plant at 300 MW, on a stated €7 billion investment, promising 450 direct and 700 indirect jobs by 2030. Abrantes council declared it of municipal interest in September 2025 and approved €16.2 million in tax exemptions.

Run both at a 30% average utilisation rate and Quercus calculates combined consumption of about 841 GWh a year, which is 5.7 times everything Abrantes consumed in 2024. Run them at full capacity and the figure reaches 2.8 TWh, close to nineteen times the council's current annual demand. Both projects also depend on the same grid connection point at Pego, the one Portugal sent to auction in July with 300 MW reserved for renewables, which is what turns two separate planning files into a single cumulative problem.

Quercus is not asking for either project to be refused. It is asking for one environmental impact assessment covering both, examining the combined effect on water resources in a region already under pressure, on the regional electricity network, on local temperatures, on agricultural and forest land and on noise and water pollution, before any favourable ruling is issued.

The request lands in a pattern rather than in isolation. Azambuja refused national-interest status to a €2 billion data centre on 8 August, citing irreversible impacts, and the €10 billion Sines project has been stuck in a court fight between EDP and the government over seawater since June. Portugal's national plan targets 1 GW of data-centre capacity by 2030 on the strength of cheap renewables and Atlantic submarine cables. The bottleneck was never going to be capital, and on this evidence it is not going to be electricity generation either. It is going to be the councils, the grid connection points and the water.

Bonds, the Euro, and a New Question About REN's Shape

Portuguese debt was quiet at the long end and marginally softer in the middle. The ten-year yield finished at 3.590% after a day spent between 3.533% and 3.600%, the five-year at 3.128% and the two-year at 2.847%. The German ten-year Bund was at 3.241%, which puts the spread at a shade under 35 basis points, effectively unchanged from Tuesday and still within touching distance of the tightest it has ever been. Nothing in today's tape suggests any Portugal-specific concern; the curve is being pushed around by European Central Bank expectations, not by Lisbon.

The euro was similarly still. The European Central Bank's reference rate fixed at $1.1669, up from $1.1662 on Tuesday, a move of seven hundredths of a cent.

The one domestic development that could matter to a listed company came in the form of a question rather than a decision. Jornal de Negócios reported that separating the planning and management of the electricity system from ownership of the infrastructure, a split modelled on the reform Britain carried out, is among the scenarios the Ministry of Environment and Energy is examining for REN's future. The economists Vítor Santos and Luís Mira Amaral both see merit in the discussion, arguing that a separation would strengthen the neutrality of system decisions and put strategic functions under clearer public control.

The context is that the State is on its way back into REN's capital for the first time since 2014. Parpública agreed on 14 August to buy 13.7% from Pontegadea, the Ortega family investment vehicle behind Zara, for €380 million, a price the government has defended as carrying a 17% premium justified by the influence and size of the stake. The deal still needs a visa from the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors). If it completes, Portugal becomes REN's second-largest shareholder behind China's State Grid at 25%, and a structural break-up of the company stops being an academic question. REN shares rose 0.14% today; the market is not pricing anything yet, which is reasonable, because nothing has been proposed.

Tomorrow

Mota-Engil is the name to watch, for a third reason on top of the two it already has. The group published its 2025 first-half accounts on 27 August last year, and a repeat of that calendar puts half-year results in front of the market on Thursday, a day after signing the largest African concession in its history and being recommended for exclusion from the largest domestic rail contract still available. Few companies get to report into a news day like that.

Beyond that the domestic calendar is thin, and Lisbon takes its direction from crude, where the question is whether the Iran and Oman understanding on Hormuz survives contact with the next headline, and from Wall Street's reading of American data showing personal consumption expenditure up 3.7% in July while growth slowed to 1.5%. Our expectation is another narrow session with a slight upward bias, the index continuing to grind toward 9,500 without conviction, and the EDP complex once again doing the carrying while the forestry names decide how much further they want to fall.