SEOUL, October 07 (AJP) - South Korean stocks fell Wednesday morning as heavy foreign selling outweighed overnight gains on Wall Street, while Samsung Electronics and SK hynix moved in opposite directions.
The benchmark KOSPI fell 0.9 percent to 6,883.09 as of 10:30 a.m. (0130 GMT), after trading between 6,861.56 and 6,977.77.
Foreign investors sold a net 940.2 billion won worth of shares, while institutions unloaded 144 billion won. Retail investors bought a net 856.8 billion won.
Samsung Electronics rose 0.74 percent to 273,500 won ahead of its preliminary third-quarter earnings announcement Thursday.
Brokerages also expect memory prices to keep rising. KB Securities said in an Oct. 1 report that Samsung's average selling price for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) could more than double next year from this year's level, helped by a growing share of higher-priced HBM4 products.
HBM stacks memory chips vertically so they can feed data quickly to artificial intelligence processors. HBM4 is the sixth generation of the technology. The brokerage expects HBM4 to account for about 80 percent of Samsung's HBM sales next year, up from 40 percent this year.
Meritz Securities expects memory supply to tighten as manufacturers shift production toward HBM and server DRAM, the main memory used in data center servers. The brokerage said that shift would push up prices for mobile memory from the first quarter of next year.
SK hynix moved in the opposite direction, falling 1.13 percent to 1,753,000 won.
The drop came even as U.S. chip stocks rallied overnight. Major AI and semiconductor shares, including Nvidia and AMD, advanced on Wall Street.
The S&P 500 rose 0.58 percent Tuesday to 7,818.93, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.45 percent to a record close of 27,599.79. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.49 percent.
U.S. stocks were supported by easing Treasury yields, expectations for strong third-quarter corporate earnings and continued optimism over AI.
The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield eased to around 5.28 percent after climbing as high as 5.349 percent in the previous session, reducing some pressure on growth stocks.
Elsewhere on the KOSPI, Hyundai Motor fell 2.4 percent to 340,500 won and LG Electronics lost 2.6 percent to 226,500 won. POSCO Future M slumped 4.7 percent to 195,000 won, while Samsung Electro-Mechanics slipped 0.8 percent to 1,660,000 won.
Gaon Cable fell 2.9 percent, while Doosan Enerbility edged up 0.12 percent to 81,600 won.
The tech-heavy KOSDAQ fell 1.2 percent to 909.09, after trading between 905.29 and 921.73.
Foreign investors sold a net 201.3 billion won as institutions unloaded 57.4 billion won, while retail investors bought a net 281.5 billion won.
Chip-related stocks were among the biggest decliners on the KOSDAQ. Jeju Semiconductor tumbled 7.2 percent to 87,000 won, while Jusung Engineering fell 3.8 percent to 268,000 won.
Elsewhere on the index, Taihan Fiberoptics slipped 1.5 percent to 18,270 won, HLB fell 1.8 percent to 46,500 won, Samchundang Pharm edged down 0.6 percent to 239,500 won and EcoPro fell 1.6 percent to 93,800 won.
By contrast, SungHo Electronics rose 2.7 percent to 33,250 won, while OE Solutions jumped 7.2 percent to 5,370 won.
Elsewhere in Asia, Japan's Nikkei 225 slipped 0.43 percent to 70,381.15 and Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index fell 0.6 percent to 24,128.79. China's Shanghai Composite bucked the regional weakness, rising 0.3 percent to 3,842.19.
The Korean won strengthened 0.04 percent to 1,339.4 won per dollar.
Oil prices rebounded, with West Texas Intermediate crude rising 1.01 percent to $90.35 a barrel and Brent crude gaining 0.96 percent to $101.55.
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