BENGALURU: Chip-heavy South Korean equities weighed on Asian stocks on Thursday as investors embarked upon a selling spree, while stocks in Singapore snapped a 10-session winning streak.
The MSCI EM Asia equities index slumped 1.4 percent, dragged lower by stocks in South Korea.
South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI ended 6.4 percent lower to erase the previous session’s gains. The declines also triggered a “sidecar” trading curb on the KOSPI and the junior Kosdaq indexes, temporarily halting program trading.
Memory chip bellwethers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, which make up just over half of the benchmark KOSPI, ended 11.5 percent and 8.8 percent lower, respectively.
Volatility in South Korean equity markets has been amplified by ETFs that are heavily weighted toward Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as forced buying and selling magnify moves in both chip stocks and the KOSPI beyond their fundamentals.
Meanwhile, the won held its ground at 1,483.60 per US dollar, near a mid-May high, after the Bank of Korea delivered a highly anticipated quarter-point interest rate hike for the first time since January 2023 to stabilise the currency.
Taiwanese stocks ended flat, after declining as much as 1.5 percent,
while TSMC ended 1.2 percent higher, before posting a 77 percent jump in second-quarter profit to a record that was far ahead of market forecasts. The world’s top contract chipmaker - a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple - accounts for around 43 percent of the benchmark.
Singapore’s FTSE Straits Times Index slid 0.6 percent after scaling record highs in the past nine consecutive sessions.
The benchmark has gained nearly 19 percent for the year so far, following yearly gains of 22.7 percent and 16.9 percent in 2025 and 2024, respectively.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, stocks in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines drifted higher. Indonesian stocks notched their sixth straight session in positive territory.
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