Losses in financial and healthcare stocks, largely caused by disappointing full-year results from Insurance Australia Group (
IAG) and private healthcare provider Healthscope, dragged down Australian shares on Wednesday.
The S&P/ASX 200 index dropped 23.43 points, or 0.4%, to 5726.70 by 0247 GMT. Accounting for more than half the losses were the financial and healthcare sectors, with the financial index dropping 0.6%.
IAG, the country's biggest general insurer by market share, plunged 10.1% to its lowest level in almost four months, after it reported a 2.1-percentage-point drop in its underlying insurance margin to 11.9%, caused by higher claims costs in its motor businesses in Australia and New Zealand and losses in commercial classes,
Reuters reported.
Healthscope, meanwhile, suffered the biggest loss among healthcare stocks, as it saw a record-low 17.8% decline after the company posted a 9.2% drop in full-year net profit.
"Markets are pretty much results-driven,” Mathan Somasundaram, a market portfolio strategist with Blue Ocean Equities, told the news agency. “The big negative results have been IAG and Healthscope. Apart from that, there isn't much in the market. We've been in a tight trading band for about three to four months, and we're still stuck in that until something happens in global macro.”
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