The profits of companies listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange fell 76% in the second quarter of this year compared to the same 2008 period to €3.7bn, according to a survey by the Financieele Dagblad published in Monday’s paper.

This is just slightly down on the first quarter when the drop was 77% in relation to the first three months of last year.
Meanwhile, the turnover of 23 companies on the AEX index (excluding a number of firms whose results are not yet known such as bank insurer ING and insurance firm Aegon) went down 33% in the second quarter of 2009 compared with the same 2008 period. In the first quarter, turnovers were down 30% in relation to a year earlier, the paper reports.
The hoped for ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery based on a rally of share prices on the stock market this summer are not reflected in these figures, according to the paper.
But Michiel Vergeer, chief economist of the national statistics office CBS, says the FD figures cannot be used to represent developments on the Dutch economy as a whole.
‘I would be surprised if the shrink in gross national product [minus 4.5% in the first quarter] doesn’t continue. But listed companies are only a limited section of the economy. For example, the government and healthcare sectors alone are responsible for a much larger section of GNP and they are growing,’ Vergeer is quoted as saying in the FD.
The CBS is due to announce the economic figures for the second quarter on Thursday.
According to the FD, the sharp fall in turnover of the listed companies is mainly due to the results of two bourse heavyweights, steel concern ArcelorMittal and oil company Shell which saw their turnovers collapse by 54% and 44% respectively.
Without these two companies, the fall in combined turnover would have been ‘just’ 9% in the second quarter (in relation to the same 2008 period), compared to 8% in the first three months of this year.