Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Up 0.57% on Utilities, Autoeuropa Keeps the ID.Every1, CTT Hunts for Deals

Utilities Carry Lisbon to a Fourth Straight Gain as Crude Falls Away

The PSI (Portuguese Stock Index) closed Tuesday, 25 August, at 9,445.44 points, up 0.57%, or 53.48 points, on the day. That is a fourth consecutive session of gains and a fresh high for the year outside April. The index opened at 9,404.65, touched 9,474.01 at 14:24 and never traded below its 08:05 low of 9,404.30, which is about as untroubled as a session gets. It now sits 0.75% below its 52-week peak of 9,516.43.

Ten of the sixteen members rose, four fell and two were unchanged. The single biggest move belonged to Mota-Engil, the Porto-based builder, which jumped 3.46% to €4.66 on no company announcement, though the group published its 2025 half-year accounts on 27 August last year and a repeat of that calendar would put results in front of the market later this week.

The theme underneath, though, was energy, and specifically the energy that is not oil. EDP Renováveis (EDP Renewables) gained 2.00% to €13.77, EDP added 1.06% to €4.685 and REN, or Redes Energéticas Nacionais (National Energy Networks), rose 0.57% to €3.56. Behind them came Ibersol, up 1.98% to €10.30, CTT up 1.24% to €6.555, NOS up 1.06% to €4.942, Corticeira Amorim, the cork group, up 1.00% to €7.06, and Jerónimo Martins up a further 0.72% to €18.21, a third straight advance for the owner of Pingo Doce. BCP, or Banco Comercial Português, managed 0.05% to €1.109 on the day's heaviest volume by far, more than 41 million shares. Semapa held at €20.75 and Sonae at €2.02.

On the losing side, Galp Energia fell 0.70% to €21.28, Navigator slipped 0.67% to €3.274, Altri lost 0.52% to €4.745 and Teixeira Duarte eased 0.10% to €0.48.

What makes Galp's decline interesting is how small it was. Brent, the European crude benchmark, dropped about 3.64% to $87.24 a barrel in late European trade, and West Texas Intermediate fell 3.46% to $82.07. That is a violent reversal from Monday's $93.38 Brent print, and the reason was diplomatic rather than economic: reports of movement between Washington and Tehran, including a one-day visit to Iran by Pakistan's army chief said to carry a proposal touching on sanctions relief, took some of the supply-disruption premium back out of the price. Traders also had reason to bank profits after a multi-week rally. A 3.6% fall in crude that costs the index's oil major only 0.7% tells you the market is treating this as a premium unwinding rather than a demand problem.

Elsewhere in Europe the tape was split. Frankfurt rose 0.68% and Milan 0.34%, while Paris lost 0.16% and Madrid 0.21%. Lisbon beat all four, which it has now done on three of the last four sessions, and it did so on a day when cheaper energy was unambiguously good news for a market whose two heaviest sectors are utilities and consumer staples.

Volkswagen Says Palmela Still Gets the ID.Every1, and the Component Makers Say That Is Not the Whole Story

Volkswagen told ECO on Tuesday that the current plan is still to build the ID.Every1, its entry-level electric car, at Autoeuropa in Palmela, alongside the T-Roc that the plant began producing in March. The German group added the caveat that it is reviewing everything, factory structures and cost competitiveness included, but said that review has not changed the Portuguese plan.

The reassurance matters because of the scale of what is being reviewed. Volkswagen has said it needs to take roughly a million vehicles a year out of its capacity, about half of that in Europe, and has flagged something in the order of 100,000 job cuts worldwide. Its first-half profit fell 30.7% to €3.1 billion, and management has put its own cost disadvantage against rivals at around 20%. Against that backdrop, Palmela's position is comfortable rather than precarious: inside the group the plant is treated as an efficiency benchmark, and its 4,000-plus employees are not in the frame. That is the same conclusion we reached in July when the capacity cuts first unsettled the Portuguese supply chain, and it has held up.

The component makers are the ones who cannot relax. On the same day, José Couto, president of AFIA, the Associação de Fabricantes para a Indústria Automóvel (Association of Manufacturers for the Automotive Industry), warned that the sector's difficulties threaten employment in Portugal and will force suppliers here and abroad to change what they make and how they make it. He was careful with his language, calling it a process of reinvention rather than a crisis, but the list of pressures he named is not a short one: European rules on combustion engines, since made more flexible, Chinese competition, and one European carmaker after another announcing restructurings.

The distinction is worth holding on to, because the two statements are not in conflict. One assembly plant with a competitive cost base and a confirmed model pipeline can be safe while the several hundred firms that supply it are not. Portugal's car output has already slipped to a four-year low during Autoeuropa's electric-vehicle overhaul, and a components industry that lives on volume feels that before the assembler does. Volkswagen confirmed new electric models for Palmela back in April; what nobody has confirmed is how many Portuguese suppliers will still be there to feed them.

CTT Reads Europe's Parcel Crackdown as a Window to Buy Something

Guy Pacheco, who took over as chief executive of CTT in May after years as the company's finance director, told ECO that the European Union's new rules on low-value imports have opened "a window of opportunity" for acquisitions and partnerships.

The rules in question are the ones that closed the de minimis exemption on 1 July and attached a €3 charge to every non-EU parcel worth under €150. Pacheco's argument is that the second-order effect is the interesting one. Faced with per-parcel costs on direct shipments from Asia, Shein and Temu are being pushed toward European distribution centres, and goods that arrive in bulk and then move locally need customs clearance, fulfilment and last-mile capacity of exactly the kind CTT sells. He expects consolidation among the smaller operators, particularly those doing customs work, on the view that compliance complexity will squeeze anyone without scale.

Investment, he said, will go into technology, teams and the Iberian logistics network, and CTT will look at anything that strengthens its logistics capacity and its offer to e-commerce clients. The company already owns Cacesa, the Spanish logistics operator it bought in 2025, so the template exists.

The context to keep in view is that CTT is making this argument from a defensive position, not a strong one. It cut its 2026 guidance to between €115 million and €125 million of recurring operating profit, down from more than €125 million, blaming a challenging regulatory environment, and its first-half profit fell 41.6% to €12.9 million even as revenue grew. Reading a regulation that has just cost you money as an opening to buy your competitors is a perfectly respectable strategy; it is also the strategy of a company that needs the second half to look different from the first. The shares rose 1.24% on the day.

Portugal Has Almost No Electric Trucks, and No Scheme to Pay for Them

The environmental association ZERO and the electric-vehicle users' association UVE published figures on Tuesday that put a number on a gap most people have not noticed. In the first half of 2026, just 0.5% of new heavy goods vehicles over 12 tonnes registered in Portugal were electric. The European Union average is 2.3%. The Netherlands is at 9.5%, Denmark 8.8% and Austria 7%. In 2024 the Portuguese figure was 0.1%, so the trend is upward; it is simply upward from almost nothing.

The picture in the 3.5 to 12 tonne bracket is better but still behind: 17.4% in Portugal against an EU average of 21.1%, with the Netherlands at 69.8%, Denmark at 57.1% and Germany at 29.8%.

The two associations put the cause squarely on the absence of a purchase-support scheme. Portugal offers some restricted tax benefits and nothing else, while Luxembourg pays up to €255,000 toward an electric truck, the Netherlands more than €120,000, Poland around €110,000, and Germany and Austria in the region of €80,000 or above. Portugal does run a purchase incentive for cars, most recently a €10 million Fundo Ambiental envelope paying €4,000 per household, which makes the omission look like a policy choice rather than an oversight.

Infrastructure is the other half. Portugal has more than 15,500 public charging points, including about 170 rated at 350 kW or above, but they were built for cars; a dozen or so hubs suitable for heavy vehicles are expected by the end of 2026, which ZERO and UVE consider inadequate. Our guide to charging in Portugal covers how that network is priced and who runs it.

The reason this belongs in a markets briefing rather than an environment one is the arithmetic behind it. Heavy vehicles are about 2% of the European road fleet and roughly 27% of road transport carbon emissions, and a single regional distribution truck burns 33,000 to 35,000 litres of diesel a year over 100,000 kilometres, the equivalent of more than thirty cars. Portugal's National Energy and Climate Plan commits to cutting transport emissions 40% against 2005 by the end of the decade. A fleet that is 0.5% electric at the heavy end is not a rounding error against that target; it is the target.

Bonds, the Euro, and a Second Count of the Insolvencies

Portuguese debt sold off modestly along the curve, with the ten-year yield up 3.1 basis points to 3.568%, the five-year up 1.4 points to 3.093% and the two-year up 0.8 points to 2.828%. The steepening is the market pricing more European Central Bank tightening at the long end rather than any Portuguese-specific worry, and the spread over the ten-year German Bund confirms it: 35.1 basis points, actually 0.3 points tighter on the day and still close to the narrowest it has ever been. Portugal is still borrowing on terms that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The euro barely moved. The European Central Bank's reference rate fixed at $1.1662, two hundredths of a cent below Monday's $1.1664, with sterling at £0.85550 and the yen at ¥185.70.

One domestic data point deserves a footnote rather than a headline. Allianz Trade counted 1,328 corporate insolvencies in Portugal between January and July, against 1,284 in the same seven months of 2025, a rise of 3.4%. That is the same period we covered on 13 August, when Iberinform put the increase at 5.5%, so treat the exact figure as approximate and the direction as confirmed. What Allianz adds is where the pressure sits: services at 345 cases and up 18.2%, construction at 258 and up 13.2%, both rising while retail (down 11.4%), agrifood (down 10.1%), textiles (down 4.1%) and transport (down 7.1%) improved. Micro-enterprises accounted for 892 of the total, just over two thirds, and their count rose 7.5%. Geographically, Lisbon went from 251 to 302, a 20.3% jump, while Porto, still the largest single district at 312, fell 12.4%. The month-to-month path was too volatile to read as a trend, swinging from a 16.3% drop in February to a 22.2% rise in March. The stable signal is the composition: the country's smallest firms, in its two most domestically exposed sectors, in its capital.

Tomorrow

Wednesday's domestic calendar is thin again, so Lisbon takes its cue from two things it does not control. The first is crude, where the question is whether Tuesday's 3.6% unwind on Iran diplomacy holds or reverses on the next headline; Galp barely flinched today, which leaves it exposed either way. The second is Nvidia, whose results Wall Street has been waiting on all week and which will set the tone for European technology on the open. Add the escalating trade fight between Washington and Ottawa, where Canada has now announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on some 700 American products, and the external risks are pointing in the same direction. Our best guess is a quiet, slightly firmer open, with the index working toward 9,500 rather than through it, and with Mota-Engil the name to watch if half-year numbers do arrive this week.