Asia markets track Wall Street slide as tech sell-off continues; Japan headline inflation holds steady

Asia-Pacific markets fell on Friday, tracking Wall Street declines as investors continued to rotate out of tech stocks and take profits from the rally in equities in recent weeks.

“There’s some profit taking,” said Keith Buchanan, senior portfolio manager at Globalt Investments. “I kind of cringe a bit if the profit taking occurs five days into a trade, but that just shows us the magnitude of what we’ve seen as far as the rotation.”

Over in Asia, traders will be on the lookout for continued rotation out of tech in the region after chip-related stocks plunged Thursday across Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

Japan’s inflation came in at 2.8% for June unchanged from May, while core inflation, which strips out prices of fresh food, accelerated to 2.6%, from 2.5%.

However, the core inflation reading was lower than the 2.7% expected by a Reuters poll of economists.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.11% after the inflation report, while the broad-based Topix was down 0.33%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index tumbled 1.46%, leading losses in Asia, while the mainland China’s CSI 300 fell 0.57%. However, Chinese chip stocks on the HSI bucked the trend and climbed, with Hua Hong Semiconductor up 4.46% and state-linked SMIC gaining 1.5%.

South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.35%, while the small-cap Kosdaq lost 0.26%. The Kospi was weighed down by extended losses from chip stocks like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which dropped 2.07% and 1.18% respectively.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 plunged 1.15%.