Asian stocks on Friday rose sharply on U.S. Federal Reserve's rate cut hopes, lifting Hong Kong's Hang Seng to a 4-year high and Japan's Nikkei to a record close, led by AI shares amid a shift to domestic chips, a market analyst said.
Hong Kong's stock market ended higher on Friday with the benchmark Hang Seng Index up 1.16 percent to close at 26,388.16 points.
The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index gained 1.13 percent to end at 9,364.94 points, and the Hang Seng Tech Index ended 1.71 percent higher to close at 5,989.27 points.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei stock index, the 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average, gained 395.62 points or 0.89 percent to 44,768.12 points.
Timothy Pope, a market analyst, recapped stock markets' performance of Hong Kong and Japan on Friday.
"In Hong Kong and Tokyo there seems to be some growing excitement that the Fed probably can't avoid a cut in interest rates this month in light of the latest U.S. jobs and inflation data. That helped push the Hang Seng up by 1.2 percent. It hit a 4-year high today. AI-related stocks did particularly well in Hong Kong. I just mentioned of course that chip stocks did well in Shanghai and this is all linked. Reports suggesting Alibaba and Baidu, two of China's biggest tech firms obviously, are apparently shifting towards domestically and in some cases self-produced and developed chips to train their newest AI models. And that's obviously instead of using imported chips made by Nvidia. This boosted their stocks substantially. Alibaba was up 5.4 percent and Baidu up more than 8 percent, but it also lifted the AI index on the Hang Seng which was up 1.8 percent at the close," he said.
"Over in Japan the Nikkei had an arguably even better finish. It was up 0.9 percent, but it ends the week with an all-time high close of 44,768 and change and it was even higher earlier on session. The gains there were very much mirroring what we saw on Wall Street overnight, although in many ways it was a bit of a pale reflection, because investors are starting to feel the Japanese stocks are looking a little bit overheated at the moment, despite what is a pretty strong corporate outlook on the earnings front and some high hopes for dividends as well. But there were undeniably strong performances from Nikkei heavyweight stocks, especially on the tech side. We had Tokyo Electon, a chip equipment maker, up 5.5 percent, and SoftBank, a big tech investor, which reversed early losses to close almost 2 percent higher."
Analyst recaps Asian stock markets' performance on Friday
