Swiss Market Ends Weak

The Switzerland market ended moderately lower on Friday on a day in which an IT outage affected many industries and countries across the globe.

The global IT outage was due to an issue in cybersecurity group CrowdStrike’s system update. The issue caused severe disruption and disabled the use of some Microsoft devices across the world.

The benchmark SMI ended with a loss of 74.17 points or 0.61% at 12,173.44. The index touched a high of 12,243.73 and a low of 12,165.05 in the session.

VAT Group shares ended down 2.27%, extending losses from the previous session. Lonza Group and Swiss Re lost 1.97% and 1.87%, respectively.

Schindler Ps ended down 1.57%. Zurich Insurance Group, Swatch Group, Richemont, Sika, Sonova and UBS Group lost 1 to 1.4%. Novartis and Geberit also ended notably lower.

Roche Holding settled flat. The company said that its proposed acquisition of certain assets held by LumiraDX has been cleared by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.

Alcon and Roche I ended higher by 0.5% and 0.46%, respectively. Swisscom, Givaudan and Partners Group edged up marginally.