St and Prysmian under pressure on the Milan Stock Exchange, with interest rates and AI concerns weighing on the market

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - Tech shares in Europe remain weak following the sell-off that hit Wall Street the previous day (with the Nasdaq closing down 1.3 per cent) and subsequently spread to Asia, particularly in Japan (Nikkei down 3.2 per cent) and South Korea (Kospi down 5.8 per cent). Weighing on the sector, on the one hand, is the fact that reports suggesting that Anthropic’s annual turnover had reached 65 billion dollars by the end of July failed to meet investors’ high expectations, on the other hand the rise in long-term interest rates, in a sector that relies heavily on borrowed capital to finance its development. Large technology companies are, in fact, raising significant amounts of capital to fund data centres and AI infrastructure, and rising yields make this financing more expensive and fuel doubts about the sustainability of the investments. Long-term Treasury yields, for example, have risen to their highest level in around 20 years at 5.3371 per cent, whilst German government bonds have seen yields climb to their highest level since 2011.

Furthermore, the market has become particularly sensitive to profit-taking following the sharp rally in AI. The ECB has also just highlighted that valuations of artificial intelligence-related stocks have risen to very high levels, fuelling the risk of a correction. Consequently, in Milan, Stmicroelectronics and Prysmian are down, whilst Infineon Technologies is weak in Frankfurt, whilst in Amsterdam, selling pressure is affecting Be Semiconductor and ASM.

Consequently, Unitree’s record-breaking debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange was not enough to allay the market’s concerns about the sector. Nevertheless, the Chinese humanoid robot start-up completed its listing on the Chinese stock exchange, raising around $900 million, and its share price rose by around 500 per cent following the debut. “Figures for the 2025 financial year place Unitree amongst the leading manufacturers of humanoid robots in terms of shipment volumes, alongside AgiBot and UBTech,” note analysts at Banca Akros, who highlight that “the IPO attracted strong interest from retail investors: according to reports, the allocation set aside for them was oversubscribed 5,500 times”. The listing, the experts continue, “creates one of the few pure players in the humanoid robotics sector on the market, and the strong interest generated by the IPO helps to underpin a positive market outlook regarding the sector’s growth prospects in the coming periods”. Banca Akros also points out that ST “has exposure to the humanoid robotics sector thanks to its extensive product portfolio, which is well-suited to supporting robotics applications”.