A cargo ship moves toward the foreign trade container terminal at Qingdao Port, Shandong Province, China, June 7, 2024.
Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Asia-Pacific markets extended gains on Wednesday, tracking Wall Street benchmarks that snapped a three-day losing streak overnight.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 0.76%, while S&P 500 up 1.04%. Heavy technology Nasdaq Composite increased 1.03% to close at 16,366.85.
Sentiment was boosted by a rebound in Japanese shares on Tuesday that saw Nikkei 225 posted its best day since October 2008, jumping 10.2%. On Monday, the index suffered its worst trading session since 1987 amid recession fears, losing 12.4%.
On Wednesday, the Nikkei index rose over 2.8% while Japan’s Topix index rose more than 4% in choppy trading.
Japan’s major trading firms extended gains for a second day, with Marubeni jump 11% and Softbank Group increased by 8%. Canon Company Japan’s top tech stocks surged more than 12%.
“The Bank needs to maintain monetary easing at the current policy rate for the time being, when developments in domestic and foreign financial and capital markets are extremely volatile,” Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Uchida Shinichi said in a speech on Wednesday.
Japan Ministry of Finance revealed on the same day that they made a record one-day yen intervention on April 29, selling 5.92 trillion yen ($40.32 billion) to counter the falling yen. They sold another 3.87 trillion yen on May 1, ministry data showed.
Hong Kong Hang Seng Index rose more than 1%, while mainland China’s CSI 300 index rose 0.2% after the release of China’s trade figures.
China’s imports rose faster than expected in July, customs data showed on Wednesday, while Export growth fell short of forecasts.
Exports in US dollar terms rose 7% in the month from a year earlier, below economists’ expectations of a 9.7% increase. July growth also slowed from June’s 8.6% gain.
Meanwhile, dollar-denominated imports rose 7.2%, much higher than economists’ forecast of 3.5%. In June, imports unexpectedly fell 2.3% amid weak domestic demand.
Korea Kospi up more than 2.5% while the Kosdaq rose more than 2.6%.
Samsung Electronics jumped about 4.5% after Reuters reported that Samsung’s 8-layer HBM3E chip has passed the tests of the US chip giant Nvidia for use in its artificial intelligence processor.
of Australia S&P/ASX 200 up 0.6% in trading.
—CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng, Hakyung Kim and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
