Rate concerns hurt Asian equities

The majority of Asian equities fell on Friday, mirroring Wall Street's decline as sentiment towards riskier assets was pummelling by growing concern over sticky U.S. inflation and rising interest rates.

Following sharp drops on Thursday, Chinese markets continued to lose ground as investors remained uneasy due to a developing trade spat with the United States and military exercises close to Taiwan.

U.S. stock index futures were stable during Asian trading after Wall Street indexes had a significant decline on Thursday due to several cautions from Federal Reserve officials over inflation and interest rates.

Due to impressive first-quarter earnings, market favourite NVIDIA saw a surge, which helped contain larger losses in the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ. However, regional chipmakers in Asia are battling their own challenges, so this rally did not spread to other regions.

This week, China experienced a surge in unfavourable mood as it seemed that the trade war with the United States had intensified. Additionally, military manoeuvres by the People's Liberation Army were observed close to Taiwan, suggesting escalating tensions in the area.

However, a sustained sell-off in heavyweight technology firms caused disproportionate losses on Hong Kong's Hang Seng index. Following a 1.7% decline on Thursday, the index fell 1.5% on Friday.

After plunging 5.2% in the previous session, Alibaba dropped another 1% after announcing that it will be issuing $5 billion in convertible bonds to support expansion.

Statistics indicating that consumer inflation decreased in April as anticipated, indicating ongoing weakness in spending, further dampened sentiment towards Japan.

Samsung fell more than 2% on Friday following Reuters' report that the memory chip manufacturer's high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips were still falling short of Nvidia's requirements because of problems with power and heating.

The study outlined possible problems with the company's plans to establish a presence in sophisticated HBM chips, the market for which artificial intelligence is expected to drive exponential growth.

South Korea's KOSPI index dropped more than 1% as a result of losses at Samsung.

(Sources: investing.com, reuters.com)