India back at no.6 in m-cap league after Korea stock rout

ET Intelligence Group: South Korea has slipped below India in the global market cap tally, hit by a sharp decline in stocks of chip makers, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. At $4.5 trillion, South Korea’s market cap has lost nearly 10% in a matter of a week.

India’s market cap, on the other hand, has remained more or less unaffected at $4.84 trillion during the period. With this, India has regained the sixth spot on the global market cap tally after ceding it earlier to South Korea last week.

Samsung and SK Hynix have lost 18% and 19% respectively, from record highs hit on June 02 amid a sharp drop in shares of technology companies working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Though Indian information technology (IT) stocks, too, showed weakness, their decline was relatively moderate, with the BSE IT index losing 7.5% during the period.

Last Friday, stocks of global companies involved in the AI field faced heavy selling, triggered by a lacklustre guidance from Broadcom — a fabless designer of microchips used in data centres and industrial markets. Despite reporting a strong quarterly performance, the company did not revise the full-year sales outlook, thereby disappointing investors. This also drove a major selling spree across AI-related stocks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost over 4% on Friday.

On Monday, the South Korean equity benchmark KOSPI lost 8.3% in a single day, led by a 10% drop in Samsung and nearly 8% fall in SK Hynix. The weakness in the Indian benchmarks was measured; the BSE Sensex and Nifty 50 closed the day 1% lower, while the BSE IT index lost 1.3% from the previous close.