"Asian Stocks" Nikkei plunges 847 points in half a day, SoftBank continues to drop 6%, Rakuten falls 8% after earnings, semiconductor equipment stocks under pressure

The night before (13th), the three major U.S. stock indices plummeted sharply. The U.S. government ended its shutdown, but some important economic data for October may "never be published," which could limit the Federal Reserve's room to cut interest rates in December. The Nikkei index reversed the upward trend of the previous two days, opening significantly lower by 514 points this morning (14th), and at one point fell by 1,035 points, hitting a low of 50,246, closing down 847 points or 1.65% at 50,434. The Japanese yen stabilized slightly, rising by less than 0.1% during the Asian session, while the dollar fell to 154.43 against the yen.

SoftBank (9984.JP) continued to decline, falling 6.3% in the first half of the day. The company previously announced that it had liquidated its holdings in NVIDIA in October, cashing out over $5.8 billion. Rakuten (4755.JP) dropped 8.3%, with the group's net loss for the first half of the fiscal year widening to 124.435 billion yen, compared to a loss of 75.962 billion yen in the same period last year.

Semiconductor equipment stocks Tokyo Electron (8035.JP) and Advantest (6857.JP) each fell by 4.6% to 5%. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.JP) and Hitachi (6501.JP) each dropped by 3.6% to 4.4%. Tokyo Electric Power Company (9501.JP) fell by 2%.

Chip stocks Sumco (3436.JP) and oil stock Inpex (1605.JP) rose against the trend by 4.7%, while Mitsukoshi Isetan (3099.JP), Panasonic (6752.JP), and pharmaceutical stock Daiichi Sankyo (4568.JP) each rose by 2.4% to 3.4%. (/da)