Asian stocks rose for the second straight week as Japanese companies began resuming production after the nation’s worst earthquake and Chinese firms posted profits that beat analyst estimates.
Hitachi Ltd, the Japanese maker of products from home appliances to nuclear reactors, jumped 3.9 percent in Tokyo after the Nikkei Shimbun reported its main factory in Japan will resume full production next month. HTC Corp (宏達電), the Taiwanese mobile-phone maker that gets about half its sales from the US, rose 7.6 percent after a report showed US companies added more workers last month.
“There’s been solid earnings from Chinese companies and US data has also been encouraging,” said Ng Soo Nam, the Singapore-based chief investment officer at Nikko Asset Management Co. “The worst of the nuclear crisis in Japan could be behind us.”
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 0.8 percent to 135.32 this week. The gauge last week recorded its biggest gain since last November, as Japan made progress stabilizing reactors at a nuclear plant crippled after the earthquake and a tsunami on March 11. The previous week, the index dropped the most since the height of Europe’s debt crisis in May last year, as Japan fought to avert a nuclear disaster and tensions escalated in Libya.
Taiwan’s TAIEX rose 21.83, or 0.3 percent, to 8,705.13 on Friday, the highest since March 9. The gauge climbed 1.1 percent this week, a second weekly advance.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average has advanced 1.8 percent since Friday last week. South Korea’s KOSPI rose 3.7 percent, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 Index climbed 2.5 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was 2.8 percent higher.
Japanese stocks gained even as a report showed the nation’s manufacturing deteriorated at the fastest pace in at least nine years last month.
“It’ll take more time for the impact of the earthquake on the economy to be clear,” said Mitsushige Akino, of Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co in Tokyo.
HTC, which counts the US as its largest market, climbed to NT$1,140 in Taipei on Friday as a report from ADP Employer Services showed US companies hired 201,000 workers last month, marking the third time in four months that the nation added more than 200,000 jobs.
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (中國工商銀行), China’s biggest lender, rose 3 percent to HK$6.56 in Hong Kong. The company said full-year net income increased 28 percent from a year earlier to 165.2 billion yuan (US$25.2 billion). That exceeded the 163.8 billion yuan average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
In other markets on Friday:
Manila rose 1.83 percent, or 74.40 points, from Thursday to 4,129.54.
Wellington closed 0.36 percent, or 12.29 points, higher from Thursday at 3,452.14.
Mumbai fell 0.13 percent, or 24.83 points, from Thursday to 19,420.39.
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