Asian shares fell on Friday, extending their biggest monthly drop since the height of global COVID-19 lockdowns in March last year due to lingering investor concern over regulatory crackdowns in China on the education, property and tech sectors.
Losses grew even after reassurances from Chinese regulators and official media helped to soothe investors’ nerves a day earlier, and following indications from the US Federal Reserve that its bond-buying program would remain unchanged for now.
A continuing outbreak of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 in China’s Jiangsu Province also weighed on the mood on Friday.
“It’s clear investors are very rattled by the regulatory crackdown,” said Michael Frazis, portfolio manager at Frazis Capital Partners in Sydney, adding that the market continues to face other near-term pressure.
“You will have talk about tapering, and you do have a lot of coronavirus beneficiaries which are largely in the tech sector. [Earnings] growth will be slow, and they will be reporting numbers off of very high bases for this time last year... We expect tech indices to be challenged in the near term, but we’re very optimistic over the medium and long term.”
On Friday, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell 1.33 percent, taking its losses for the month to more than 7 percent.
In Taipei, the TAIEX ended down 155.40 points, or 0.89 percent, at 17,247.41, after moving between 17,237.67 and 17,429.01. Turnover totaled NT$535.965 billion (US$19.16 billion). The index dropped 1.85 percent from a week earlier.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 dipped 1.8 percent to 27,283.59, its 11th straight month of declines on the last trading day in the month. For the week, it lost 0.96 percent. The broader TOPIX dropped 1.37 percent to 1,901.08, posting a weekly decline of 0.17 percent.
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.42 percent to 3,397.36, diving 4.31 percent from a week earlier.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 1.35 percent to 25,961.03, losing 4.98 percent on the week.
South Korea’s KOSPI declined 1.24 percent to 3,202.32, posting a weekly drop of 1.6 percent, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.33 percent to 7,392.6, dipping 0.02 percent from a week earlier.
The declines in Asia came despite robust US earnings and forecasts, as well as strong second-quarter economic growth figures, that helped to lift Wall Street to record intraday highs on Thursday.
In the second quarter, the US economy grew past levels seen before the COVID-1`9 pandemic, helped by rising vaccination numbers and government aid, although the expansion fell short of expectations and rising infections are clouding the outlook for the third quarter.
Additional reporting by staff writer, with CNA
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS