Employees work at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), operated by Japan Exchange Group Inc. (JPX), in Tokyo, Japan, Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024.
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Asia-Pacific stocks plunged on Wednesday, led by Japanese stocks Nikkei 225 Index It comes after a sell-off in U.S. technology stocks and weak U.S. economic data that stoked recession fears.
Japanese Nikkei 225 Index It fell 4.01%, leading the decline in Asian stock markets, while the Topix fell 2.74%.
Semiconductor related stocks such as Renesas Electronics It plummeted 10%, becoming the index’s largest decline. Tokyo Electronics fell 7.3%, while Advant test A drop of more than 9%.
SoftBank GroupShares of the company that owns chip design company Arm fell more than 5.7%. Arm designs chips for Nvidia.
Korean Cospi The Kosdaq opened down 2.61%, and the small-cap Kosdaq fell 2.94%.
Heavyweights Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix (both Nvidia suppliers) fell 2.76% and 6.95% respectively.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 index fell 1.46%.
Hong Kong Hang Seng Index The futures index was at 17,487 points, lower than the Hang Seng Index’s last closing point of 17,651.49 points.
In the U.S., chipmaker Nvidia fell more than 9% in regular trading, dragging down other peers including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Marvell.
The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), an index tracking semiconductor stocks, fell 7.5%, its worst day since March 2020.
In addition, the ISM manufacturing index in August was 47.2%, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from July, but lower than the 47.9% expected by Dow Jones. The metric measures the percentage of companies reporting expansion, so anything below 50% represents contraction.
All three major stock indexes had their worst days since the global sell-off on August 5. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.51% and the S&P 500 Index fell 2.12%. The Nasdaq fell the most, down 3.26%.
—CNBC’s Fred Imbert and Alex Harring contributed to this report.
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