MARKETS: In China, government-backed uplift – Asian stock markets scattered

Asian markets were mixed on Thursday. At the time of review, mainland China’s CSI 300 index was up 0.2 percent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 0.5 percent, and Japan’s Nikkei index was up 1.0 percent. Korea’s Kospi index was down 1.1 percent.

Asian markets got a boost as China assured investors that the government is committed to supporting the stock market. According to China’s securities market authorities, local insurance companies should invest more of their funds in the local stock market to maintain confidence in the country’s stock market. Starting this year, insurance companies are encouraged to allocate at least 30 percent of new income to Chinese stocks.

One of the world’s largest chip manufacturers SK Hynix released its fourth quarter earnings report on Thursday. Operating income increased to 8,100 billion dollars in October–November from 5,600 billion dollars in the comparison period.

The result was in line with preliminary expectations, but the company’s share was still down about 2.7 percent. SK Hynix expects the demand for HBM products to grow in the future as well due to, among other things, the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence.

HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) stands for SK Hynix and AMDwhich enables, for example, the memory bandwidth of graphics cards to be raised to a clearly higher level than before.

Today, Singapore publishes its latest inflation figures for December.

The Bank of Japan will decide on its key interest rate today and tomorrow. The head of the central bank, Kazuo Ueda, has hinted that an interest rate hike is possible.

At 8:19 a.m., one euro was worth 1.04 dollars, 162.97 yen, 0.85 pounds and 11.46 Swedish kronor. The dollar was 156.55 yen and the pound was 1.23 dollars.