Australian Stock Market Report –Afternoon December 19, 2014

An office worker is reflected in the window of the Australian Securities Exchange building displaying the ASX50 curve for Wednesday in central Sydney August 7, 2013. Australian shares skidded 1.3 percent on Wednesday, its biggest fall in five weeks, hit by sharp falls in miners and financials as regional markets tracked a soft Wall Street lead amid uncertainty about the U.S. Federal Reserve's stimulus programme REUTERS/Daniel Munoz (AUSTRALIA - Tags: BUSINESS)

 Australian shares completed a trifecta of winning days on Friday, closing around the best levels of the session. Over the course of the last week the ASX 200 has risen by almost 2.3 % , balancing the loss of the pre-ceeding week when the market fell by almost 2.2%.

 One factor that stood out on Friday was the performance of resource stocks, which were well supported despite the weaker tone for underlying commodity prices in the last day. Base metals mainly fell in the last day on demand concerns driven by weaker readings on the Chinese economy of late, including data on new home prices in China which saw declines in 57 out of the 60 cities tracked by China's government. Elsewhere, crude oil benchmarks fell on surplus concerns after Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil producer, said It would find it "difficult, if not impossible" to give up market share by reducing crude oil production. Santos (STO) announced that it has secured $1 billion funding facility, two weeks after abandoning a Euro debt raising which was said to have been as much as 500 million euros .STO has secured a three-year $1 billion bilateral bank loan facility with the ANZ Bank , STO shares closed at $7.99 a gain of 3 cents or 0.38%

 Telstra (TLS) will provide planning and design services to support the rollout of the Federal Government's National Broadband Network (NBN). The agreement could be valued as high as $390 million. TLS will provide network designs for NBN Co. under terms that could extend to four years. The contract comes after the two parties renegotiated a $11.2 billion agreement for Telstra to transfer its copper and cable network to NBN Co. that was finalised last weekend. TLS shares ended the week at $5.89 a gain of 7 cents or 1.2%

 Sydney Airport (SYD) enjoyed a solid gain after the airfield operator said that passenger numbers through Australia's busiest airport are improving reflecting strong growth in travellers from Asia. International traffic through Sydney Airport in November was up 2.2 per cent on the same time a year ago, to 1.07 million passengers, while domestic passenger numbers rose 1.3 per cent to 2.17 million. The number of Australians travelling to the Philippines increased by more than 56 per cent in November, due to new connections to Manila. Chinese and Taiwanese passenger numbers were also higher. As a result Asian airlines are increasing capacity for the busy Christmas and New Year period, with China Eastern Airlines doubling its daily Shanghai service. SYD shares finished the session at $4.90 a gain of 19 cents or 4%

 Engineering group Downer EDI (DOW) announced that it had successfully bid on a $2 billion contract to work on Adani Group's Carmichael Coal Mine project in Central Queensland. The contract is expected to span between five and seven years and will see Downer providing services ranging from drilling and blasting to coal and waste haulage to the mine. The $10 billion dollar Carmichael mine will be one of the largest coal mines in the world. DOW shares were at $4.54 at the close, a gain of 30 cents or 7.1%

 The next few weeks are will be quiet on the data front in the US, Europe, Australia. Financial markets could remain quite volatile driven by falling commodity prices, central bank policies and growth concerns across major economies play out.

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