US President Donald Trump this week implemented a planned second round of tariff increases on Chinese-made goods. In addition to the February increase to 10%, an additional 10% tariff increase went into effect. Asian stock markets responded by falling prices.
Image source: Tokyo Electron
Strictly speaking, Trump also warned of the inevitability of increasing import duties to 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, but the Asian stock market was more focused on changes in the rules for importing Chinese goods into the US. The quotations of Asian issuers were further pressured by a 9% decline in the share price of American artificial intelligence solutions provider Nvidia.
Shares in Japanese chip-making equipment supplier Advantest fell 9%, the most since October last year. Japanese market veteran Renesas Electronics saw its shares fall 6.35%. Japanese corporation SoftBank, which is participating in the StarGate project, saw its shares fall 6.25%.
In South Korea, SK hynix shares fell 3.26 percent, but Samsung Electronics shares managed to rise on the back of the recent launch of its Galaxy A series smartphones with AI capabilities.
The Chinese stock market did not remain on the sidelines of the trend. Shares of Alibaba companies related to the AI segment to one degree or another fell by 2.23%, while Kingsoft Cloud shares fell by 8.46%. Online retailer Meituan saw its shares fall by 0.62%, while Chinese automakers BYD (-6.6%), XPeng (-1.97%) and Li Auto (-2.68%) also supported the trend. The Chinese auto industry was barred from entering the American market under Biden, when 100% import duties on Chinese electric vehicles were introduced, but the shares of these companies fell this week “out of solidarity”. However, shares of the Chinese tech giant Tencent rose in price by 0.91% during trading in Hong Kong.
In Taiwan, the main news affecting the stock market should have been TSMC’s announcement of plans to increase spending on building new plants in the US from $65 billion to $165 billion, but it also led to a decline in the company’s stock prices by more than 2%.