Hong Kong stocks slip as HKMA currency intervention stokes rate concerns
Hong Kong
stocks retreated from a three-month high as property developers and lenders slumped after the monetary authority intervened in the currency market and mopped up liquidity, threatening to push up local interest rates.
The Hang Seng Index fell 0.5 per cent to 24,348.08 at 10.03am local time on Thursday. The Hang Seng Tech Index gained 0.3 per cent. On the mainland, the CSI 300 Index and the Shanghai Composite Index both slipped 0.1 per cent.
Sun Hung Kai Properties tumbled 3.8 per cent to HK$89.50 while peers Henderson Land lost 3.7 per cent to HK$27.60. HSBC slipped 0.3 per cent to HK$95.35, Bank of China (Hong Kong) weakened 0.8 per cent to HK$4.72 and ICBC fell 0.6 per cent to HK$6.41.
The
Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold US$1.2 billion and bought the equivalent worth of Hong Kong dollars at HK$7.85 during New York trading hours on Wednesday. It was the first move since 2023 to prevent the currency from weakening beyond the weak side of its trading band.
It had
forewarned that the intervention would stoke local interbank rates and make property financing more expensive.
Other tech leaders also declined, surrendering some of their best gains this week. Alibaba Group Holding fell 2.4 per cent to HK$112.70 and Tencent Holdings slipped 0.4 per cent to HK$510.50. New Oriental Education and Technology slumped 4.1 per cent to HK$42.55, giving up some of the previous gains spurred by a JPMorgan rating upgrade.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- South China Morning Post
Foreign ice cream is no longer cool in China. Here's why that matters
For years, Feng Hui, an operations manager living in Guangzhou, made a tradition of taking her daughter Claire to celebrate her birthday at a Haagen-Dazs store near her home. But this month, the 14-year-old had other ideas: she told her mother she wanted to spend her birthday at a popular local tea bar with her friends. 'Chinese teenagers now prefer domestic brands – they look great, and new products are coming out every month that tempt them to take selfies and post on social media,' Feng said. The birthday cake also got a makeover. Instead of a Haagen-Dazs ice cream cake – which used to be a byword in China for luxury and sophistication – Claire chose a custom-made cake from a local bakery featuring her favourite video game character. In her eyes, Haagen-Dazs is simply 'not cool' – a sentiment that is becoming common among young Chinese, reflecting broader shifts in the country's consumer landscape.
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- South China Morning Post
Nvidia taps two young Chinese AI experts to strengthen research
US chip giant Nvidia has hired two prominent artificial intelligence (AI) experts who hail from China, underscoring the rising global recognition of talent from the mainland and their key contributions to the field's advancement. Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China's Tsinghua University, said on their respective social media accounts that they joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company. Zhu, who received his bachelor's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, joined Nvidia's Nemotron team as a principal research scientist, according to Zhu's post on X from over the weekend. Zhu's LinkedIn profile showed that he has also been an assistant professor at the University of Washington since September 2024. 'We'll be joining forces on efforts in [AI] model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure – with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia,' Zhu said, adding that the team was committed to open-sourcing its work and sharing it with the world. Nemotron is a group at Nvidia dedicated to building enterprise-level AI agents, according to the team's official website. The team's Nemotron multimodal models power AI agents for sophisticated text and visual reasoning, coding and tool-use capabilities. Jiao, who received a PhD in electrical, electronics and communications in engineering from Stanford University in 2018 after graduating from Tsinghua with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, said on LinkedIn over the weekend that he joined Nvidia to 'help push the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).'
South China Morning Post
an hour ago
- South China Morning Post
So, Hong Kong has pledged to legalise ride-hailing. Don't hold your breath
This week marks the third anniversary of John Lee Ka-chiu taking up the office of chief executive, with just two years to go in the current term. I wonder if we are getting close to a sensible resolution of Hong Kong's taxi/hired car situation. Though I am an optimist, on the basis of past form, I find it difficult to be confident. Advertisement After all, 2025 also marks the 11th anniversary of Uber setting up in Hong Kong. Yet here we are – two Hong Kong chief executives have come and gone, and a company known around the world for offering a quality transport service still operates here in a legal grey area without a proper regulatory framework . Meanwhile, it and other ride-hailing companies operate smoothly around the world, including in all our competitor cities in the region. But let's start with the taxi situation. I am not going to join the chorus of complaints about poor service overcharging , dangerous driving and geriatric drivers for two reasons. First, these have been well aired and there are mechanisms for addressing them, albeit of doubtful efficacy. And secondly because I have always received reasonable service. Possibly because of my crewcut hairstyle and use of Cantonese in giving directions, the drivers assume I might be a retired police officer and are worried I could still have friends in the force. But I take the basic point that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, the vast majority of our taxis still require payment in cash. We say we are going all out to attract tourists from around the world but our marketing material advises visitors to bring cash if they plan to take a taxi. Advertisement I know that starting next January , all cabs must have installed equipment for accepting payment by card. But why has it taken so long? And what assurance do we have that passengers will not be hearing the Cantonese equivalent of: 'Sorry gov, the machine's on the blink, is it OK if we just settle this one in cash?'
