Japan's stock market opened sharply lower on October 9, with the Nikkei 225 Index falling more than 1% to 68,240.47 points. South Korea's stock market was closed for a holiday today.
On the individual stock front, weighed down by concerns over OpenAI's revenue, Japanese chip-related shares fell across the board. SoftBank Group Corp tumbled more than 6%, while Kioxia Holdings Corp and Renesas Electronics Corp each dropped more than 4%.
According to media reports, as of the end of September, OpenAI's annualized revenue stood at approximately $50 billion, below the $70 billion figure that had been widely reported in the media. The reports said the discrepancy mainly stems from differences in accounting methods rather than a $20 billion shortfall in OpenAI's business. Anthropic counts revenue generated through cloud service partners such as AWS and Google Cloud as revenue, whereas OpenAI does not handle it the same way. As a result, investors adjusted the figures OpenAI published to make them comparable with Anthropic's data, which also contributed to the roughly $70 billion estimate.
Following the release of this news, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 3.39%. NVIDIA Corp shares dropped about 3%, Oracle Corp fell nearly 6%, CoreWeave Inc slid nearly 8%, while Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Broadcom Inc each declined about 4%, and Intel Corp dropped more than 5%.
In addition, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made clear on Thursday that Japan's economy has moved past the stage of relying on large-scale fiscal expansion and ultra-loose monetary policy to drive up inflation, further downplaying the long-standing characterization of her as a leader of the "reflationist" camp. Asked about the direction of monetary policy in parliament, Takaichi stated plainly that she "fully respects the Bank of Japan's independent decision-making authority." This statement effectively eased market concerns that political forces might interfere with the pace of the Bank of Japan's interest rate hikes.
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