Before the bell: chip stocks take flight

Richemont sees Chinese appetite for luxury return. BlackRock posts a strong year, and excellent results from TSMC lift chip stocks worldwide.

Following TSMC’s results, investors were once again in high spirits around chip stocks yesterday. The Euro Stoxx 50 climbed 0.6%, led by Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML (+6%). On the Dutch blue-chip index AEX (+1.4%), chip names such as ASMI (+11.2%) and BE Semiconductor (+7.5%) rose even more sharply. The Bel20 was also pulled higher by a chip designer, with Melexis (+3.9%) riding the optimistic wave in the sector. Swiss luxury group Richemont (-2.4%), which owns well-known brands such as Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, reported that luxury sales in China are picking up again. We are curious to see whether the same will be true for other luxury houses, such as LVMH, which reports its figures next week. On the other side of the Atlantic, indices edged slightly higher. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both advanced 0.2%. TSMC’s figures breathed new life into the AI boom, with US chip designers such as Nvidia (+2.1%) and AMD (+1.9%) also benefiting. Investors remain cautious, however, about companies such as Oracle (-1.9%), which are taking on substantial debt to finance data centres for a limited number of clients. Meanwhile, the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock (+5.9%), attracted inflows of more than 700 billion dollars in 2025. As a result, total assets under management at the firm behind the iShares ETFs rose to more than 14,000 billion dollars.

In Asia this morning, the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong is down 0.6%, while Japan’s Topix is 0.1% lower. In Taiwan, TSMC shares (+3%) are for the first time able to react to the excellent results the company published yesterday. Today in the US, we will also receive figures from State Street Global Advisors, the asset manager behind the SPDR ETFs, also known as “Spiders”.

Chinese consumers fall in love with luxury again

Luxury group Richemont reported that sales in the third quarter of its broken financial year rose by 11% compared with the same period a year earlier. Jewellery sales at brands Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels even increased by 14%. According to the Swiss group, this growth is largely due to improving conditions in the Chinese market. That is also good news for other luxury groups about to open their books. Next Thursday we expect results from LVMH, followed by Kering and Hermès. We are keen to see whether China is also making a comeback for these other luxury players.

BlackRock keeps growing

BlackRock reported that, for the first time, it now oversees more than 14,000 billion dollars in assets. A large share of these assets comes from ETFs marketed under the iShares brand. The world’s largest asset manager recorded inflows of 350 billion dollars in the first three months of 2025. In the final quarter, inflows accelerated further, with an additional 342 billion dollars coming in. For the full year, inflows totalled nearly 700 billion dollars. For BlackRock, this marks both its strongest year and strongest quarter ever in terms of net inflows. Naturally, assets under management also benefited from rising global equity markets. Investors were pleased and pushed BlackRock’s share price up by 5.9%.

Did you know…

that BlackRock also has a fast-growing segment active in the popular private markets? The arm focused on private credit attracted 7.2 billion dollars, while the segment investing in unlisted infrastructure raised 5 billion dollars.

This article was translated from Dutch and was originally published on Spaarvarkens.be.