A stock analyst at Krungsri Securities expected the index to rise between 1,450 and 1,460 points before falling in response to the rise in regional markets as US non-farm employment increased by 2.5 million while the unemployment rate dropped to 13.3 per cent after an easing of lockdown measures.

“We expect the negative economic conditions to have already bottomed out and begin to recover,” he said.

“The market also gained positive sentiment from the rising crude oil price. The price rose more than US$40 [Bt1,258.12] per barrel after the Opec+ grouping decided to keep oil production at 9.7 million barrels per day until July.”

The analyst advised investors to beware of mass-sell offs as the SET Index would be under pressure due to signs of “overbuying” and tight valuation.

He recommended investors buy:

▪ Energy stocks which will benefit from the rising crude oil price, such as PTT, PTTEP, Top, PTTGC, IRPC, SPRC and IVL

▪ Stocks which will benefit from the cabinet’s move to come out with tourism stimulus measures, such as Mint, Centel, ERW and AOT.

▪ Stocks which will benefit from the Transport Ministry’s move to summarise the second phase of the Eastern Economic Corridor transport infrastructure, such as Amata and WHA.

▪ Stocks whose second quarter performance will improve, such as CKP, Tasco, STA and RS.

The SET index rose by 24.69 points, or 1.75 per cent, on Friday, closing at 1,435.70 points, with transactions totalling Bt120 billion. Foreign investors made net buys of Bt52 million in stocks and Bt623 million in bonds. There were 15,224 net short TFEX contracts.

Dressed in green vests and with new safety rules to comply with, workers raced to complete developments earmarked for Alphabet Inc.’s Google, just days after a navy coronavirus testing ship nearby left.

Construction resumed even as the virus throws up a new challenge for the wider Irish model: how does an economy almost uniquely dependent on U.S. firms cope with a brake on global investment? Companies like Twitter, Google and Pfizer helped revive the country after the nation’s real estate bust, while overseas cash poured in to help build the offices and apartments which host the firms and their workers.

The flow of that money into Ireland is slowing, according to Rick Larkin, director of construction company Twinlite, which has built around 3,000 homes and has another 1,200 in the pipeline.

“The big worry is around financing,” said Larkin. “While banks here have been doing some, limited, lending for construction, it’s mostly been U.S. financiers and hedge funds. As their funding dries up, funding in Ireland dries up. What happens in New York and elsewhere feeds through to Dublin.”

Ireland is one of the most open countries in the world in economic terms, according to the KOF Globalisation Index, having built its economic strategy on a low corporate tax rate and a plentiful supply of well-educated, English-speaking workers.

The U.S. has a deficit in its goods trade with Ireland of about $19.6 billion so far this year, outstripped only by its deficits with China and Mexico, figures released on Thursday showed. Ireland’s economy grew 1.2% for the first quarter of 2020, in part boosted by exports, the nation’s statistics agency said on Friday.

Acting as a bridge between the U.S. and Europe, Ireland won the most foreign investment projects in Europe on a per capita basis in 2019, advisory firm EY said last week.

Dublin’s office vacancy rate has dropped to about 5%, and U.S. firms now employ directly or indirectly about one in five workers in Ireland. Google, Facebook and Twitter have more than 12,000 workers in the city between them.

Now, with most employees working remotely, their offices lie virtually empty. Ireland is facing the worst recession in its history, according to the Economic Social and Research Institute, outstripping even the 2008 crisis, when a real estate crash almost bankrupted the nation.

“People froze and went in war mode” once the lockdown hit, said Kevin Nowlan, chief executive of Hibernia REIT, whose clients including Twitter. “Everything went into pause.”

Ultimately, Nowlan says, workers will push to return to offices, and CBRE Group Inc. has forecast a revival in the market in the second half of the year.

“In the long term, full-time home working just isn’t an option for most people,” said Nowlan. “We like change, we like variety, we want some fun, especially the younger, more dynamic crew.”

The IDA, responsible for attracting companies to Ireland, expects new investment in 2020 and 2021 to be hurt, but says the economy has previously proved its resilience in bouncing back.

Marlet Property Group, which is completing a development close to the River Liffey partly earmarked for Google, said its project is proceeding as planned. At least 80% of Irish foreign investment projects are expected to be maintained, according to EY.

Yet, although the virus is the immediate threat, Ireland also faces longer-term challenges. President Donald Trump has vowed to bring drug firms back to the U.S from countries such as Ireland, while changes to international tax law may hurt tech companies based there.

And in a covid-19 era, winning new investment might prove tricky. For now, that’s almost impossible: even if a U.S. executive is able to travel, quarantine requirements means a two-day trip to scout a site could take weeks.

Meanwhile, offices continue to go up. About 340,000 square meters (3.7 million square feet) of new offices are expected to completed in Dublin between 2020 and 2021, according to broker CBRE. About 45% has been pre-let, while some of the rest is under negotiation, Marie Hunt, executive director for research at CBRE’s Irish arm, said.

Some are taking an imaginative approach, with Twinlite’s new development including apartments with home offices attached.

“We are lucky in that we have secured financing on our new projects, but it’s going to be more difficult and expensive,” said Rick Larkin.

“I wouldn’t want to be building offices now. Will demand evaporate for rental properties? No, I don’t believe it will,” he said. “But maybe we’ll will have to charge a little bit less.”

Next month, as the U.K. retail industry inches its way back to business in the age of coronavirus, a mall a couple of miles away in a less glamorous part of the city will get a new tenant.

Harrods will showcase discounted stock during the iconic British department store’s summer sale in a space that can help cope with covid-19 social distancing. Rather than uniformed doormen opening taxi doors, there’s a massive, multilevel parking garage and a train station.

From the glitz of Harrods down to your average strip-mall chain, retailers are adapting to get cash registers busy again as Britain opens up a corner of the economy it depends on more than other large European countries.

The pandemic has taken a particularly heavy toll on the proverbial nation of shopkeepers. The industry provides jobs for more than 3 million people with almost 400 billion pounds ($504 billion) of sales in 2019 equivalent to about 5% of gross domestic product. Consumer spending as a proportion of the economy is higher than in France and Germany, including for clothing and footwear.

Essential retailers, such as supermarkets, pharmacies, hardware and pet stores, have stayed open and enjoyed rising sales, while all other shops had to close their doors in March as on much of the continent.

Companies will need to “recalibrate their brains” to determine new operational models, said Ewan Venters, chief executive officer of Fortnum & Mason, another high-end British food and homewares retailer. “Ultimately in business it is all about providing confidence,” he said. “If confidence is back then consumption will increase, which will lead to positive sales.”

Fortnum’s food hall on London’s Piccadilly has already opened back up after implementing safety measures. They include changing the layout of store displays, installing plexiglass screens at pay points, training staff on how to manage social distancing and offering them visors and face masks.

Even before the pandemic, retailers were struggling with high rents and property taxes and a structural shift in consumer behavior. British shoppers buy more of their goods online than anywhere else in Europe.

Debenhams, a department store chain, is in administration-a type of U.K. insolvency process-and fashion retailer French Connection has warned it could run out of money in a few months without a cash injection or a significant improvement in sales. Most retailers have drawn down their revolving credit facilities and taken advantage of government support such as a staff furlough program.

Many European countries have already allowed most retailers to reopen. Department stores in Paris did it in steps, with Le Bon Marche on the Left Bank welcoming shoppers on May 11 and Printemps Haussmann and Galeries Lafayette eventually following by the end of the month.

The U.K. government is only now cautiously beginning to ease the lockdown restrictions after the country recorded more deaths than anywhere else in Europe. Since the start of this week, car showrooms and outdoor retailers in England, such as garden centers, have reopened and the rest can do so on June 15.

In addition to setting strict hygiene guidelines, many European countries have set a fixed number of customers allowed per square meter of retail space, and the U.K. is expected to follow suit.

Primark, Britain’s largest clothing chain, will put staff on doors with “clickers” to count customers entering and leaving. There will also be “sneeze screens” at checkouts, new systems to line up for payment, and “marshals” who can intervene if areas are becoming too crowded.

Associated British Foods, which owns Primark, has already opened 111 of its stores in nine European countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy, using these measures, said John Bason, its finance director.

Flexibility from retailers and governments will be key, according to Bason. He cited Austria as an example, which increased the number of people allowed per square meter. “We are all having to find our way in this,” he said.

Balancing safety requirements with the traditional shopping experience is certainly the most significant challenge for Harrods. It has small outlets in department stores worldwide and some airports and a soon-to-be started beauty store spin-off, yet its business is focused firmly on about one million square feet of space in London’s Knightsbridge.

Owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund for the past decade, the store is famed for selling everything and anything, from tea to artwork and furniture. At one stage, it even had an exotic pet department that sold “Gertie,” a pet elephant to Ronald Reagan before he became president.

Next month, though, Harrods will open a new standalone store in the Westfield shopping center in Shepherd’s Bush, a part of west London that is still classified as one of the capital’s most deprived locations. The aim is to take some of the pressure off its historic hub.

As one of the world’s largest shops and a major tourist attraction, Harrods typically attracts 15 million shoppers a year to a building that originally was designed for 19th century standards.

The building, with its terracotta exterior and grand dome, was built in 1883 and has multiple entry points and a warren of underground tunnels. There are 16 escalators within the buildings, multiple stairwells, and-in normal times-a bustling food hall, restaurants, and many interactive experiences, particularly in its toy department. The building also has protected status, meaning any significant alterations cannot happen without approval from the local authority.

Harrods said a senior leadership team has been meeting daily to come up with a plan to create designated entry and exit points and install signage, sneeze screens, and “sophisticated and independent software to monitor footfall” to ensure strict limited capacity is maintained across the store.

Staff have been trained on how to manage social distancing within the store and sanitization stations have been set up throughout the building. Its cafes, wellness clinic and beauty salons will remain closed for the time being. It’s also not clear when the many personalized services that Harrods offers-from gift wrapping and bed linen customization to its “discreet” invitation-only personal shopping for its richest customers-will resume.

Harrods had never needed to close its doors before covid-19, said Michael Ward, its managing director. The business is now looking at every aspect of its current operations and “thinking differently to enable growth, while protecting customers and employees,” he said.

The disbursement during the period was Bt2.259 trillion, accounting for 70.61 per cent of the total budget of Bt3.2 trillion. This exceeded the targeted of 69.33 per cent by 1.28 percentage point, the department deputy director-general, Wilawan Payanoi, said.

Of the total, Bt338.861 billion is state investment, and Bt1.914 trillion was regular expenditure.

The move is in line with the government’s policy urging state agencies to accelerate spending, aiming to shore up the flagging economy.

He advised investors to follow the consideration of tourism stimulus measures, the Covid-19 situation both domestic and overseas, the US Federal Reserve’s meeting on June 9-10, and tensions between US and China.

“For international factors, we advise following US and China’s consumer and producer price indices in May, Japan and the euro-zone’s gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year, and the euro-zone industrial production in April,” the analyst said.

On Friday (June 5), the SET Index closed at 1,435.70, up 6.91 per cent compared to the previous week’s close and the highest in more than three months. The index’s average daily transaction was Bt94.758 billion, up 21.97 per cent compared to the previous week’s close.

The index rose throughout this week on hopes of an economic recovery as several countries gradually resumed their economic activities.

Meanwhile, investors have bought many large-cap stocks, especially bank and energy stocks, while foreign investors returned for net buys in Thai stocks as well.