Tech losses lead Hang Seng Index to lower close
Tech losses lead Hang Seng Index to lower close
The benchmark Hang Seng Index ended the day down 331.56 points, or 1.36 percent, to close at 24,035.38. File photo: RTHK
Stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong ended mostly lower on Thursday, led by declines in the tech sector, as markets struggled to sustain the positive momentum from the Sino-US trade talks that lacked concrete details.
In Hong Kong, the benchmark Hang Seng Index ended the day down 331.56 points, or 1.36 percent, to close at 24,035.38.
The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index slid 1.53 percent to end at 8,729.96 while the Hang Seng Tech Index slumped 2.20 percent to 5,331.33.
Mainland Chinese stocks ended up mixed, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index up 0.01 percent at 3,402.66 and the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.11 percent down at 10,234.33
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, gained 0.26 percent to close at 2,067.15.
Among major losers, chipmaker SMIC fell 2 percent to a one-week low. Alibaba weakened 3.2 percent and EV maker Xpeng slid 6.7 percent.
The CSI Rare Earth Index closed flat after slipping nearly 1 percent in the morning session and continued to hover near its seven-month high.
A trade truce between the world's two biggest economies was back on track, US President Donald Trump said, a day after negotiators from Washington and Beijing agreed on a framework to ease bilateral retaliatory tariffs.
Under the agreement, Beijing will lift export curbs on rare earth minerals and the United States will restore Chinese students' access to its universities, Trump said on Truth Social.
Yet the terms remain subject to final approvals, with details notably absent. The 55 percent tariffs on Chinese imports will also stay, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said.
"We still don't know if what Trump says will actually happen. It's disappointing that the tariffs rates were not dialled down at all and tech curbs on China were not even mentioned," said Jason Chan, senior investment strategist at Bank of East Asia, Hong Kong.
The talks left key issues, like chip exports, unaddressed, leaving room for conflicts in the future, and no one knows for how long the current truce will last, he added.
Chinese markets have been struggling to recover from trade shocks for the past two months after Trump announced sweeping tariffs on April 2 that threatened the global trade system.
The CSI 300 Index has barely eked out any gains since then, while the Hang Seng Index has climbed 3.5 percent, but the two are underperforming the nearly 10 percent bounce in the MSCI World Index .
The market is less sensitive to trade talks and investors are shifting focus to economic fundamentals, Wang Zhuo, partner at Zhuozhu Investment, said.
"The key for China now is to bolster manufacturers' confidence and break the deflationary trend." (Reuters/Xinhua)
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