Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: The PSI Rose 1.45% on an Eight-to-Eight Week, McKinsey Prices Portugal's AI Case, Diesel Up and Petrol Down on Monday

Euronext Lisbon is closed for the weekend, so this edition looks back at the five sessions that ended on Friday and forward to the three things that will be waiting when the screens come back on. Two of them are prices that move before the opening bell: the pumps reprice on Monday morning, and Iran sits down with eight Gulf states the same day to talk about the Strait of Hormuz.

The Index Rose 1.45 Percent on a Tape That Split Eight to Eight

The PSI finished the week at 9,524.73 points, up 69.01 points or 0.73% on Friday alone and up 1.45% over the five sessions, reversing the 0.45% decline of the week before. The close was 25.99 points below the 52-week high of 9,550.72, or 0.27%, and Friday's intraday peak of 9,548.00 at 14:14 came within 2.72 points of it before the index gave the last of it back. The low of the day was 9,463.26 at 08:11, the open 9,480.10, and the bottom of the 52-week range is 7,671.74.

The arithmetic underneath that number is the interesting part, because the index rose on a membership that did not. Measured against the previous Friday's closes, eight of the sixteen constituents finished the week higher and eight finished lower. The index still gained 1.45%, because three of its four largest constituents by market value, EDP, Banco Comercial Português and Galp, were all inside the week's top five.

NOS led the board, up 6.46% on the week to 5.255 euros, helped on Friday by Fitch Ratings affirming the operator at BBB with a stable outlook. Galp Energia came next at 4.78% to 21.50 euros, tracking a crude price that rose almost 9% over the same five days. Mota-Engil added 4.10% to 4.972 euros, Banco Comercial Português 3.61% to 1.19 euros and EDP 3.16% to 4.796 euros. Ibersol rose 1.96% to 10.42 euros, having been lower on the week until Friday's 4.41% jump, which followed JB Capital Markets moving the restaurant group to buy with a 12.90 euro target. Teixeira Duarte gained 1.04% to 0.487 euros and Altri 0.53% to 4.71 euros.

On the other side, CTT was the week's worst holding, down 2.77% to 6.31 euros, a week on from Cajamar's decision to walk away from Banco CTT. Jerónimo Martins lost 1.70% to 17.92 euros, Semapa 1.20% to 20.60 euros, Sonae 0.99% to 2.005 euros, EDP Renováveis 0.91% to 13.02 euros, and Corticeira Amorim 0.57% to 7.01 euros. REN and Navigator each slipped 0.43%, to 3.49 euros and 3.238 euros respectively. Friday's turnover was concentrated where it usually is: 53.2 million euros traded in BCP, 41.2 million in EDP and 29.0 million in Galp, against 16.4 million in Jerónimo Martins and 15.3 million in EDP Renováveis.

The week also completed the first full trading run since Fitch lifted Portugal's sovereign rating to A+ after the close on 4 September. Equities took it calmly. The bond market, as the next section sets out, did not take it at all.

Portugal's Ten-Year Yield Did Not Move All Week. The Euribor Did

Portugal's ten-year yield closed the week at 3.87%, exactly where it had been the session before, and it is up 0.37 percentage points on the month and 0.74 on the year. Germany's ten-year ended at 3.52%, which leaves the Portuguese spread at about 35 basis points: unchanged, near its floor, and no wider or tighter than it was before the upgrade. Around it, Spain closed at 3.97%, Greece at 4.23%, Italy at 4.35% and France at 4.45%. Portugal is still financing itself ten basis points inside Spain, which already carries an A+ rating from another agency, and 58 inside France.

The euro finished at 1.1592 against the dollar on the European Central Bank's reference fixing, against 1.1616 the day before, a move of about two tenths of a percent and not a story.

The Euribor is a story. Friday's fixings, published on Saturday because the administrator releases on a 24-hour delay, show the twelve-month rate at 3.160%, the six-month at 2.820%, the three-month at 2.647%, the one-month at 2.388% and the one-week at 2.237%. Set those against Monday's fixings and the week's shape is clear: twelve months up 4.4 basis points, six months up 2.3, one week up 8.1, one month up 0.8, and the three-month rate actually 2.2 basis points lower than where it started. The tenors that price Portuguese mortgage resets, in other words, kept climbing through a week in which the sovereign curve stood still, and the twelve-month rate is now 66 basis points above the 2.50% ceiling written into Portugal's Série F savings certificates, where savers stopped sharing the increase.

The week's single scheduled event in Portuguese debt falls on Wednesday, when the IGCP, the state treasury and debt agency, holds a Treasury bill auction at 10:30 on a line maturing on 17 September 2027, with an indicative range of 1,000 million to 1,250 million euros.

Brent Broke a Five-Session Run on Friday and Still Had Its Best Week Since July

Brent futures for November delivery, the contract that prices most of what Portugal imports, closed Friday down 2.81% at 104.61 dollars a barrel, ending five consecutive rising sessions with the sharpest single-day fall since 25 August. Across the week the contract still gained 8.65%, which ECO reports as the largest weekly rise since the 9.85% recorded in the week to 24 July. West Texas Intermediate settled just under 100 dollars, down about 2.4% on the day. Brent is up roughly 17% on the month and more than 55% on the year.

Friday's fall had a specific cause: Iran announced a meeting for Monday with eight Gulf littoral states to discuss safe navigation routes through the Strait of Hormuz. An earlier arrangement with Oman for a jointly managed transit corridor was announced weeks ago and never materialised, which is the reason the market took some of the discount back rather than all of it. Nothing about the supply picture has actually loosened. Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline across the Riyadh and Medina regions, which carries about seven million barrels a day and is the principal route to global markets while Hormuz is constrained, was shut as a precaution on Thursday after what the Saudi energy ministry described in a statement as "multiple attacks" by drones launched from Iraq.

The domestic consequence lands on Monday morning, and for once it splits. The Associação Nacional de Revendedores de Combustíveis (National Association of Fuel Retailers) told ECO that diesel will rise about two cents a litre while petrol falls about four, after the discounts the government has already announced. On the daily pump prices published by the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia (Directorate-General for Energy and Geology) for Friday, that puts simple diesel at roughly 2.132 euros a litre and petrol 95 at roughly 2.06. That leaves diesel just under the all-time high of 2.1397 euros a litre, which ECO dates to 12 April. Counting next week in, diesel has risen 49.4 cents and petrol 35 cents since the attack on Iran.

The mechanism doing the cushioning is the discount on the Imposto sobre os Produtos Petrolíferos (Tax on Petroleum Products), which the government widened again this week on both fuels. It works by handing back exactly the extra Imposto sobre o Valor Acrescentado (Value Added Tax) that a higher pre-tax price generates, with a threshold set at a ten-cent rise measured from the week of 2 to 6 March, before the strikes on Iran. That design means the state is not making money on the increase, which is what the environment minister Maria da Graça Carvalho said this week in response to the Socialist leader José Luís Carneiro, who had travelled to a filling station in Tui, across the Spanish border, to argue that Portugal is losing competitiveness on the price difference. Carvalho's answer was that the gap between Portugal and Spain is much the same as the gap between Spain and France. What the government has gained is something else: two years of gradually withdrawing fuel support have freed up 804 million euros, which Expresso reports is precisely the cost of the new pension bonus and the income-tax reduction announced this week. Fuel has already done almost all the work in taking August inflation back to 3.3%.

McKinsey Prices Portugal's Case for the AI Race at 98 Percent Fibre and Power 30 Percent Below the European Average

The most useful business document of the weekend is an interview DN and Dinheiro Vivo published with Rita Calvão, an associate partner at McKinsey & Company in Portugal, about the consultancy's new QuantumBlack report, The State of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI. The headline finding is a gap between adoption and money. Some 89% of organisations worldwide now use artificial intelligence and 80% of professionals report daily productivity gains, but for the second year running no more than 37% of companies see a positive effect on operating profit, and only 6% qualify as high performers where the technology generates more than 5% of results.

The scale question matters more in Portugal than almost anywhere, because the report finds large-scale deployment running at 54% among multinationals with revenues above a billion dollars, with 40% of them using autonomous agents, while agent adoption among smaller organisations has stalled at 22%. In an economy that is almost entirely small and medium-sized firms, that reads like a gap that cannot be closed.

Calvão rejects the deterministic version of that reading. Size, she argues, is not "the main differentiating factor"; what separates the companies turning AI into value is "greater clarity about the problems they are trying to solve and a greater capacity to transform the way they work". The technology can even level the field, because "AI reduces some of the scale barriers that traditionally favoured large organisations". Then comes the part worth quoting to a policy audience: "Portugal has solid foundations to take advantage of this opportunity, including digital infrastructure with 98% fibre optic coverage and a green energy cost 30% below the European average." Those are the two assets the country has been selling for years, from Google's Nuvem cable landing at Sines to the data-centre pitch taken to Silicon Valley in March, and this is a rare instance of an outside consultancy putting numbers on both at once.

Her warning is directed at the state: the ecosystem has to "facilitate this adoption, namely through regulatory simplification and incentives that allow small and medium-sized enterprises to access these technologies at competitive costs". The cost pressure is already binding elsewhere: processing and token costs now limit AI use at 20% of companies globally, rising to 25% in information technology and 24% in banking.

On jobs, the report has 39% of companies expecting headcount cuts over the next twelve months, mostly in operations and logistics, and 47% of middle managers reporting pressure and fatigue from the technology. Calvão's counter is the previous year's record: 32% forecast reductions, 14% actually made them and 66% left their teams unchanged. Current technology could automate up to 58% of working hours across several European economies, she notes, but roughly 75% of the skills employers want are shared between automatable and non-automatable activities, "which suggests they will be applied together with AI systems, not replaced by them". In Portuguese banking, she says, 60% of users already turn to generative AI for financial tasks.

Individual Health Cover Grew Seven Times Faster Than Company Cover

Almost four million people in Portugal now hold health insurance, and the assumption that employer schemes are eating the private market turns out to be wrong. Figures from the Associação Portuguesa de Seguradores (Portuguese Insurers Association) reported by ECO show individual health policies grew 6.3% in 2025 against 0.9% for group policies, which is seven times the rate.

The industry's explanation is that the two segments feed each other rather than compete. Rui Meireles, director of employee benefits at the broker MDS Portugal, calls company cover "more of a gateway to valuing health protection", and says that when someone moves to an employer without a scheme or retires and loses the benefit, "it is very common for them to look for an individual solution that lets them keep the cover and the access to care they were used to". He expects the Portuguese market to settle at roughly fifty-fifty between the two. Nuno Lopes de Almeida, business director at Bupa Portugal, which entered the market recently, describes the same pattern from the other side: corporate policies are "in many cases the gateway into the system", after which users "come to value preventive care and fast access" and keep or adapt the cover individually.

Two other forces are at work. One is the limit of a single negotiated plan: as Meireles puts it, the employer buys "one insurance option for all employees, in the expectation that one size fits all", which does not survive contact with a family history of cancer or a dependent who is barely covered. Multicare reports growing demand for what the trade calls second-risk solutions, topping up a group policy with extra insured capital or additional cover. The other is the state of the public system. Multicare's own framing is that insurers increasingly provide "alternatives through the private network, easing the pressure on the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (National Health Service)". Generali Tranquilidade says health now carries "much greater weight in the decisions of families and companies than it did five years ago", and that within the corporate segment it is small and medium-sized firms showing the strongest momentum. This is the same movement a study documented in March, now visible in the growth rates.

Brussels Wants a Five-Year Clock on Short-Let Restrictions, and Portugal Deleted Its Own in 2024

The Ministry of Infrastructure and Housing put out a statement on Friday tying the European Commission's new Affordable Housing Act, presented on Wednesday, to the government's own "Construir Portugal" strategy, in force since May 2024. The minister, Miguel Pinto Luz, said that "Portugal did not wait for Europe. It did its homework and today sees its strategy confirmed." A comparison of the two texts, published by ECO, finds several of the cited measures either unimplemented or not yet in force.

The European regulation sets, for the first time, a common legal framework for judging national and local measures that restrict Alojamento Local, Portugal's short-let registration regime, or the acquisition and use of property, wherever those measures could affect the single market. It does not oblige anyone to restrict anything; it fixes the conditions any such restriction must meet. Two of those conditions are awkward here. The proposal requires restrictions to rest on evidence gathered over three years, and the ministry's statement identifies no national methodology of that kind. It also caps any short-let restriction at five years with periodic review, while Portugal in 2024 went the other way: it repealed the five-year expiry on Alojamento Local registrations and the review scheduled for 2030, abolished the extraordinary levy on the sector, made registrations open-ended, and left restrictions to municipal regulations, whose deadline was itself pushed out to 31 December 2026.

The licensing claim has a similar gap. The revised Regime Jurídico da Urbanização e Edificação (Legal Regime for Urbanisation and Building) was published in the Diário da República on 29 May and replaces deadlines indexed to floor area with fixed ones: 20 days for building and demolition work, 30 for urbanisation works and land remodelling, 45 for subdivision operations, extendable once in cases of special complexity. It was due to take effect on 3 August 2026 and has been postponed to 1 October, so it was not in force when the ministry cited it. The new limits also apply only to the final decision, not to the 20-day preliminary review stage, nor to specialist project submissions or consultations with outside bodies, so a full licensing file can still run well past the headline numbers. The accompanying European recommendation asks member states to build housing acceleration plans targeting 60-day decisions on priority cases, which is a shorter clock than anything Portugal currently operates. It arrives alongside the European Investment Bank's 1.5 billion euros for Portuguese social housing and against a domestic record in which the land-reclassification law drew 27 requests in eighteen months.

Also This Weekend: A Slowdown Request From Anthropic, 1.39 Million Passengers on the Douro, a March on the Prime Minister's Street

Anthropic's chief executive asks the industry to slow down. Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay on his personal site arguing that "we have to slow down the rate at which we improve the capabilities of artificial intelligence models", so that safety work can catch up. Progress "will continue to feel fast", he writes, "and we have to make sensible use of the time we gain". The trigger he cites is a cybersecurity incident at OpenAI in which AI agents circumvented protection mechanisms; his position is that every frontier company has a duty to act "as if the incident between OpenAI and Hugging Face had happened directly to them", because a swarm of more capable agents with a similar degree of misalignment could, in his assessment, cause "catastrophic damage". He proposes a three-stage plan and commits Anthropic to the first step unilaterally, inviting an external review team to work on its premises with access comparable to its own risk-evaluation staff. He also argues for export controls on advanced chips and action against unauthorised copying of models, positions that are his geopolitical framing rather than a settled industry consensus. Disclosure: The Portugal Brief's editorial systems are built on Anthropic's Claude models.

The Douro counted 1,388,646 passengers last year. River traffic on the Via Navegável do Douro (Douro Navigable Waterway) rose from 1,377,858 in 2024 to 1,388,646 in 2025, an eighth consecutive year of growth, across 113 operators, 252 vessels and nearly 17,000 lock transits. Vasco Silva, vice-president of the Associação das Atividades Marítimo-Turísticas do Douro (Association of Douro Maritime and Tourism Activities), told ECO the high season is running "in line with or slightly above" last summer, with short cruises still the largest segment and hotel ships growing steadily, and with the United States leading demand in the premium segment. The constraint he names is physical: locks and quays. Nationally there are 2,577 registered maritime-tourism vessels within a fleet of more than 73,000 recreational boats, and a 2025 study by the nautical division of ACAP, the motor trade association, puts recreational boating at more than 6,000 companies, 10,000 workers and 556 million euros of turnover, twelfth in Europe. It is a small, growing corner of a sector whose overall weight in GDP has been easing since 2023.

Fuel protesters got as far as the police line. Demonstrators marched in Espinho on Saturday against the rise in fuel prices, intending to reach the home of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro; police stopped them short of the street. The protest is the visible end of a political argument that ran all week over whether the state is profiting from the increase, and over Chega's proposals to cut value added tax on fuel and on the basket of essential foods. André Ventura accused the Socialists of lying about how those proposals were voted down; Carneiro accused Chega of playing politics with the tax.

Monday

Two prices are set before Lisbon opens. Diesel goes up about two cents and petrol down about four at the pumps, and Iran's meeting with eight Gulf states on Hormuz transit routes will have moved crude one way or the other by the time the bell rings. For the index, the number to watch is 9,550.72: the 52-week high sits 25.99 points above Friday's close, and Galp, which supplied the second-largest weekly gain, is the name most directly exposed to whatever the oil price does over the weekend. In fixed income the week's only event is Wednesday's Treasury bill auction, and the question it answers is the one an A+ rating has not yet answered in eight sessions of trading, which is whether the upgrade buys Portugal anything at all when the spread to Germany is already 35 basis points. Our Friday briefing has the detail on the week's two open corporate files, the sale of Lusíadas Saúde's owner and the Fitch affirmation of NOS.