This month the Reserve Bank of Australia decided to stubbornly hold the cash rate to 4.35 per cent and said that its monetary policy “will need to be sufficiently restrictive” until it is confident that inflation can be tamed to within its 2-3 per cent target range.

While there’s much speculation on how that will pan out for businesses and consumers who have faced high interest rates and a cost of living crisis that has crushed discretionary spending, analysts are watching how the market will react to the announcement over the coming days.

There’s been movement among some of the country’s biggest companies on the ASX today.

Australia’s biggest owner of suburban malls, Region Group, posted a statutory net profit of $17.3 million, according to its full-year results. It has therefore recovered from the previous year’s $123.6 million loss.

The company said portfolio occupancy during the period had improved from 97.8 per cent to 98.1 per cent. As of midday on Tuesday, its shares were trading up around 1 per cent at A$2.27.

However, a company that saw a massive jump in its share price on Tuesday was online retailer Temple & Webster.

It came as it reported record revenue of $498 million for the 2024 financial year, up 26 per cent on the prior year. Around 57 per cent of all Temple & Webster orders are now made by repeat customers, according to the company. New customer orders also increased year-on-year from 491,000 to 654,000, this despite discretionary spend being tight among most middle-income households in the country.

A pedestrian walks past the Reserve Bank of Australia offices in Sydney, Tuesday, April 3, 2018. (AAP Image/Brendan Esposito) NO ARCHIVING

The company has been focusing on the use of AI within its business model. “Our mid-term target is to reach $1 billion-plus annual sales and we are progressing well against our strategic goals, which includes developing leading AI/data capabilities in our category,” said Temple & Webster’s CEO Mark Coulter. “Our internal AI team has developed a Generative AI (‘Gen AI’) ‘solutions in a box’, which is now powering a suite of tools from product recommendations to live chat interactions with customers. Already, we have seen millions of dollars of cost base savings, and conversion rate improvements of >10 per cent due to the AI initiatives are live on site.”

Its growth in sales is being rewarded by investors. Its share price has surged more than 26 per cent to land at A$12.03. Approximately $1.8 million of Temple & Webster shares have been repurchased since 17 June, with up to $30 million worth of Temple & Webster shares slated to be repurchased.

While Temple & Webster did well at the market on Tuesday, one of the country’s most popular job search portals Seek had a disappointing day with its share price down nearly 10 per cent to A$20.1. It came as it reported a 13 per cent drop in earnings to $483 million in fiscal 2024 from a year ago, as job ads fell across the Asia-Pacific region.

The company said that its job ad volumes plunged 20 per cent in the 2024 financial year, from record high pre-pandemic levels.

The reduction in available jobs has seen a rise in applications per ad. Data from Seek showed that there were now about 175 applications per job posted on its website in Australia, compared to about 50 potential workers per available role in July 2022.

The unemployment rate in June was 4.1 per cent seasonally adjusted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The economy added just over 50,000 jobs. Full-time roles rose by 43,300 and part-time roles rose by 6,800.