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Originally published at CDM.press.

Korea’s stock market fell sharply on Tuesday as the country’s major semiconductor stocks plummeted. South Korea’s main stock market index KOSPI plummeted over 5% on Tuesday as shares of country’s major technology companies continued to slide for the fifth consecutive trading session. Yonhap News Agency reported that the KOSPI index plunged 348.89 points or 5.46% to 6,035.35, after sliding as much as 6.05% to 5,998 late in the morning.

Samsung Electronics fell 7.39% to 232,000 won, and SK hynix plunged 10.09% to 1.44 million won. The Korea Exchange enabled the sell-side to put on a sidecar after the index fell more than 5% for more than one minute. Foreign investors offloaded a net 4.51 trillion won or $3.35 billion of Seoul stocks.

Several analysts cited a renewed worry over the sector of AI, as well as increasing competition from China’s memory chip makers. Report that Chinese ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, has made rapid technical progress, prompted sharp falls in the chip makers. Han Ji-young, an analyst at Kiwoom Securities, told Yonhap that concerns over OpenAI’s revenue and the completion of local chipmakers’ share buybacks continued to weigh on tech stocks.

Meantime on Wall Street, overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.38% and the Nasdaq composite dropped 0.44%. South Korean investors await Wednesday’s US consumer price index for a read on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate stance ahead of the central bank’s October meeting. The South Korean currency meanwhile has fallen to 1,345.1 against the dollar compared with yesterday’s close of 1,335.1.

The big tech and security stories in Asia are not going away today as another North Korean missile launch and the unveiling of a new defense museum in the North Korean capital featuring an Hwasong-20 ICBM take center stage on a day when South Korea’s stock market slumped.

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