The French and German markets ended the week on a firm note, with strength in technology stocks among others. But other countries showed a more mixed picture and the FTSE Eurotop 300 index ended the day little changed. Over the course of the week it lost about 2.7 per cent.

The MSCI index reweighting, or more precisely the first half of it, took effect from the close of the markets last night. The changes involve large amounts of indexed funds flowing out of stocks such as Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom, although analysts said the bulk of them had already moved in previous days or weeks.

Yesterday Deutsche Telekom was up 2.7 per cent and France Telecom up 2.3, on a day when the telecoms sector as a whole was unchanged. The close of the Paris market was postponed by 10 minutes while the effects of any last-minute portfolio rebalancing were taken into account. The sector drew comfort from the French government's announcement of prices for a second round of UMTS mobile licences. As expected they were sharply lower than those of the first round.

Bouygues, which dropped out of the first round but is considering the new offering, was up 2.6 per cent at €38.26.

Technology stocks were also in the black, led higher by software group SAP which rose 4.5 per cent to €138.50. Last night SAP announced an unexpectedly strong recovery in its US business since September. The end of the third quarter had seen a drop of 32 per cent in US licence revenues as clients rushed to defer orders following the events of September 11th.

Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics was up 2.2 per cent at €37.90. The Japanese group Fujitsu said it would shut one of its chip-making plants in the US, helping to reduce capacity and take the pressure off prices.