NewzHONG KONG (AP) — Asian shares declined Friday tracking Wall Street losses, while oil prices gained with Brent crude trading above $108 a barrel in its highest since May. Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 2.8% to 63,442.30. Shares of multinational investment holding firm SoftBank Group, an investor of OpenAI, fell 4.1%.
South Korea’s Kospi lost 2.3% to 6,872.39. Samsung Electronics slid 3.9%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix declined 3.6%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dipped 0.8% to 24,753.54.
The Shanghai Composite index was down 1.8% to 3,862.73. Shares of Chinese AI chipmaker Enflame surged around 180% in its trading debut in Shanghai. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.2% to 8,712.20.
Taiwan’s Taiex lost 1.7%, while India’s Sensex declined 1%. Oil prices continued to gain early Friday as tensions between the U.S. Brent crude, the international standard, was 0.9% higher at $108.59 per barrel.
It was approximately $72 a barrel in late February, before the start of the war. crude was up 0.7% to $103.22 per barrel. Oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway critical for global oil transport, remained “well below pre-war levels,” wrote ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey in a commentary Friday.
That’s “underscoring how fragile the situation has become,” they said. On Thursday, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 dropped 0.6% in its fourth straight loss. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.6%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 0.7%.
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