London View

King Digital Drops as Sales Slump, Japanese Q2 GDP Collapses After Sales Tax Increase

There’s slightly brighter news for Germany this morning after yesterday’s gloomy consumer confidence tidings; July’s CPI figure for the Euro zone’s largest economy met expectations, seeing a 0.3% increase from June. The DAX is currently up by around 0.8%. However, this news cannot hide the increased economic difficulty parts of the Euro zone are currently facing, with countries such as Portugal and Italy feeling the pinch. Every poor set of economic figures released by Euro zone countries serves to pile on the pressure on the ECB to take further steps to combat deflation.

Online game firm King Digital saw over $1.4 billion wiped from its value as stocks dropped by over 20%. The firm announced a 5% drop in revenue for Q2 2014, as well as issuing a profit warning, lowering expected revenues for the third quarter from $525 million to $500 million. Markets have seen a combination of declining sales for King’s best-selling Candy Crush Saga, along with the failure of any other of its released titles to reach a corresponding level of success. After-hours trading saw King Digital going at $14 a share, a far cry from the halcyon days five months ago when the firm launched its IPO at $22.50 per share.

Overnight figures from Japan show that the country suffered a significant fall in its GDP for the second quarter. It is not as if the drop was entirely unexpected, with the actual GDP drop being marginally smaller than predicted; a drop of 1.7%  from Q1 rather than the expected drop of 1.8%. However, the drop was still extreme, with Japan’s GDP dropping by an annualized 6.8% in the second quarter, its biggest contraction since the record earthquake of 2011. The Yen dropped across the board, lower by 0.21% against USD and 0.43% against AUD. The Nikkei closed up by 0.35%, South Korea’s Kospi index was up 0.8% at the close and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 Index fell by 0.4%.

After a slow start to the week, today brings a number of economic releases, with the Japanese and German figures reported earlier due to be followed by the BoE’s Quarterly Inflation Report out at 10:30 this morning and US Retail Sales Figures due this afternoon.