Weekly Report 45/2025

Cautious optimism

The Swiss stock market rose significantly for much of October, but closed lower for five consecutive days last week. The SMI ultimately ended the month at 12,234 points (-2.7% last week). The mood was characterized by subdued confidence among heavyweights such as Nestlé (-4%) and Novartis and Roche (both -5%).

This came as no surprise. Globally, consumer goods and healthcare stocks were on the retreat. Some of the industry leaders suffered significantly heavier losses last week because the subdued consumer demand was even more noticeable there (e.g., Puma, Adidas, Hugo Boss, Zalando, Garmin, Mondelez, Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill).

On the other hand, Apple (+3%) delivered encouraging news about extremely strong demand for the iPhone 17. Of the total annual revenue of $416 billion at the end of September, more than half came from the iPhone ($209 billion). High-margin revenue from Apple Music, Apple Pay, the App Store and other services exceeded $100 billion for the first time. For cloud services, Apple relies primarily on Alphabet and Amazon. In the AI sector, another connection with Alphabet is emerging.

However, the best performers last week were Amazon and Nvidia (both +9%) and Alphabet/Google (+8%). They are all already making money with artificial intelligence (AI), as their quarterly reports revealed. Google’s own AI, called Gemini, already has 650 million monthly users (+44% compared to the second quarter of 2025). Industry leader ChatGPT from OpenAI has 800 million. At Alphabet, even the traditional search business is doing well, contrary to all fears, partly because AI results have been added. Alphabet presented the highest-revenue quarter in its history, with revenue exceeding $100 billion for the first time and a profit of around $35 billion.

Amazon impressed as a global cloud leader with its aggressive capacity expansion and monetization of the AWS infrastructure. The AWS cloud division grew at its fastest rate (+20%) since 2022 and contributed more than half of operating profit. In 2026 alone, $125 billion is to be invested. This year, around $90 billion will be spent on building new cloud and AI infrastructure. In contrast, Microsoft (-1%) disappointed because demand for Azure computing capacity could not be met by a long shot. The number of Microsoft’s data centers is expected to double over the next two years.

The weekly balance sheet ultimately showed a slight decline because we weight Swiss stocks more heavily than US technology stocks. On the other hand, all DecarbRevo solution strategies achieved clear weekly gains, having already benefited significantly from the growing demand for decarbonized energy since the beginning of the year. More on this can be found in the November monthly report, which will be published this week.