分类： business

India is gearing up for two of the most anticipated initial public offerings in its modern economic history, with Jio Platforms and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) both targeting listings before the end of 2026. Industry analysts describe the dual offerings as potentially transformative events that could redefine the trajectory of the country’s capital markets, reflecting a decade of sweeping structural change across how India lives, works, invests and consumes.

The two firms submitted their draft IPO prospectuses within days of each other last month, kicking off the formal approval process for the listings. Reliance Industries, the conglomerate controlled by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, owns Jio Platforms, the digital and telecom arm that sparked a nationwide digital revolution after its 2016 launch. Jio is projected to raise approximately $4 billion through the offering, with a total estimated valuation ranging between $120 billion and $160 billion. For the NSE, the world’s largest derivatives exchange and one of the top three equity venues globally by trading volume, the IPO will sell a 6% equity stake to raise around $3.3 billion, valuing the exchange at $57 billion.

Yatin Singh, chief executive officer of investment banking at Emkay Global, explained that the scale and significance of these offerings extend far beyond their sheer size. Even at their current valuations, the combined listings will lift India’s overall national market capitalization considerably, but their real meaning lies in what they represent: a tangible reflection of the massive shifts that have reshaped India’s economy over the past 10 years. “These are unique businesses which don’t get built often,” Singh noted. “NSE is a direct proxy of the ‘financialisation’ of Indian household savings into mutual funds and stocks, while Jio is the story of a company that single handedly ushered in a digital revolution, becoming a driving factor for several new-age Indian businesses.” He compared the potential impact of the listings to the landmark software company IPOs that reshaped Indian markets decades ago.

Jio’s disruptive entry into India’s crowded telecom sector in 2016 redefined the entire industry overnight. Offering nearly free data to hundreds of millions of first-time internet users, it triggered a brutal price war that consolidated a fragmented market of 17 operators into a near-duopoly. Ten years ago, fewer than 200 million Indians had access to the internet; today, that figure is approaching 1 billion, with Jio alone claiming 525 million subscribers who use its network for everything from digital payments to online shopping and streaming entertainment. Thanks to Jio’s low-cost tariffs that democratized smartphone access, India is now the world’s largest consumer of mobile data, outpacing developed markets including the United States and China.

This digital transformation has rewoven the fabric of daily economic life in India. Launched the same year as Jio, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) real-time payment system grew from processing near-zero transactions to 228 billion annual transactions by 2025, according to brokerage firm Zerodha. Between 2019 and 2026, paid subscribers to over-the-top streaming platforms rose 40%, and Kotak Bank research shows Indian households’ monthly mobile data bills have tripled – growing three times faster than rural wages – as consumers spend more time on video streaming and social media. Today, Jio is evolving beyond its core telecom roots, positioning itself as a homegrown digital and artificial infrastructure giant through strategic partnerships with global tech leaders Nvidia and Meta to build domestic data centers and large language models trained on Indian languages. Elara Securities notes the firm is now shifting from market share acquisition to active monetization, driven by gradual tariff increases, rising data consumption, and growth in higher-value postpaid plans – a trend that signals India’s consumer market is maturing rapidly.

The NSE’s growth trajectory, meanwhile, tracks the explosion of retail investing that has swept India in recent years. When the pandemic locked millions of households at home, a wave of first-time mom-and-pop investors entered the stock market, fueled by the widespread availability of cheap mobile data and affordable smartphones. The total number of active online trading accounts surged from roughly 30 million before the pandemic to more than 200 million today. The NSE now serves as the core backbone of India’s $4.85 trillion stock market, which ranks as the fourth largest in the world by total capitalization. The exchange generates revenue from every trade executed on its platform, and has delivered consistently strong profits even as trading volumes fluctuate with market conditions. After years of delays caused by a series of governance hurdles, its upcoming IPO signals the maturing of India’s market infrastructure and the broadening of its investor base, according to Feroze Azeez of Anand Rathi Wealth Limited.

Azeez summed up the broader significance of the dual listings, saying “Together, Jio and NSE represent the twin pillars of India’s new economy.” The simultaneous offerings are expected to expand India’s investable universe for global capital, giving foreign investors direct access to two sectors that are central to India’s long-term growth narrative. However, industry experts remain divided on whether the IPOs will be enough to reverse the recent outflow of foreign capital from Indian markets. Over the past year, Indian equities have been among the worst-performing major markets globally, as foreign investors pulled billions of dollars out of the country to chase higher interest rates in the U.S. and AI-focused investment opportunities elsewhere in Asia. A depreciating rupee has further eroded India’s appeal for overseas investors.

Domestic investor confidence has also been shaken in recent years, after many small retail investors suffered losses on high-profile IPOs from major domestic firms including PayTM and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). Dozens of other recent large IPOs are currently trading below their initial listing prices, leaving many households wary of new offerings. Analysts agree that the final success of the Jio and NSE IPOs will hinge entirely on their pricing. “Even high-quality businesses can deliver disappointing returns if they are issued at overly aggressive valuations,” Azeez noted.

HONG KONG – A closely-watched official economic survey released Tuesday has delivered an unexpected bright spot for China’s manufacturing sector, revealing that factory activity accelerated its expansion in June, fueled by strong global demand for artificial intelligence-related hardware that has pushed export volumes higher.

Data published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows the official manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) – a key benchmark for measuring manufacturing sector health – rose to 50.2 in June, up from a flat 50 reading recorded in May. This outcome outpaced the consensus forecasts from a survey of economists, defying widespread market concerns that China’s post-pandemic economic recovery was losing traction.

The PMI operates on a 0-100 scale, where any reading above the 50 threshold signals the sector is expanding, while a figure below 50 marks contraction. Breakdown of the survey’s sub-indexes offers further evidence of the sector’s improved performance: the new orders sub-index jumped to 51.2 in June, climbing from 49.9 in May, while the production sub-index also edged up to 51.4 from May’s 51.2 reading.

In an official statement accompanying the data release, NBS chief statistician Huo Lihui noted that the June PMI results confirm a gradual warming of China’s overall economic climate. However, independent analysts have struck a more cautious tone, pointing out that the current growth rebound remains heavily concentrated in a narrow range of sectors.

“China’s economy has regained some momentum lately. But this remains heavily dependent on exports and AI-related tech,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at global research firm Capital Economics, wrote in a client note published Tuesday. “External demand remains the main engine of growth for China’s manufacturing sector.”

Economists have repeatedly flagged persistent weaknesses in domestic demand, rooted in a multi-year downturn in China’s key property sector that has left consumers more cautious about discretionary spending. Many argue that the current growth model driven by exports and AI investment is unbalanced, and additional policy intervention will be needed to put the recovery on a more sustainable footing.

Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING Bank, emphasized that further targeted policy support from Beijing this year to stimulate domestic consumption and private investment would deliver meaningful benefits. Such measures, Song noted, could help China avoid the risks of relying on an increasingly lopsided growth pattern.

Chinese policymakers have set a full-year economic growth target of 4.5% to 5% for 2024. At present, most economists project the country is on track to meet this goal, supported in large part by the ongoing surge in AI-related manufacturing exports that is propping up overall factory activity.

In the bustling eastern Singapore township of Tampines, a queue stretching two full blocks wraps around the popular Durian Ninja fruit stall nearly every day. Since mid-June, the stall has given away 600 kilograms of free durian daily—two whole fruits per customer—an extraordinary promotional generosity made possible by a historic oversupply of the pungent, spiky fruit across the border in Malaysia.

Malaysia, the world’s leading producer of premium durian varieties, typically harvests roughly 550,000 tonnes of durian annually. But 2026 has brought an unforeseen “durian tsunami”: a perfect storm of maturing new plantations and ideal growing conditions that flooded global and regional markets, crashing wholesale and retail prices across the board. For fruit lovers across Southeast Asia, the price collapse is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to indulge in high-quality durian at a fraction of usual costs. Sixty-nine-year-old Cherng, waiting in the Singapore queue, told the BBC he and his family now eat durian almost every day, accessing top-grade fruit for close to 50% less than they paid in previous seasons. Consumers across both Malaysia and Singapore are flocking to stalls offering steep discounts and occasional free giveaways, snapping up the surplus as quickly as vendors can unload it.

However, the windfall for consumers has turned into an economic crisis for Malaysian durian farmers. The current glut is the end result of a decade-long durian boom driven by surging demand from China, particularly for premium varieties like buttery, bittersweet Musang King—often nicknamed the “Hermès of durians” for its high market value and cult following among Chinese consumers. At the height of the boom, thousands of growers cleared existing rubber and oil palm plantations to plant new durian orchards, betting on continuing high returns. Now, a decade later, those newly planted trees have all reached maturity at the same time, flooding the market with a volume of fruit far outstripping current demand.

The price collapse has been staggering. Last December, Raub-based farm owner Lu Yuee Thing sold his Musang King durian to retailers for an average of 13.50 Malaysian ringgit ($3.30) per kilogram. This month, he says he can only command half that price. Johor-based farmer Han Sing Keng has cut his Musang King prices by nearly a third, selling the premium fruit for just 50 ringgit per kilogram, and has turned to growing bananas to offset lost income. Many lower-quality, ungraded durians from new plantations are flooding local markets at rock-bottom prices, dragging down the value of higher-grade product: many of these cheap, unripe or inconsistent quality fruits are labeled as Musang King despite failing to meet export quality standards, undercutting established producers. Some premium varieties like Black Thorn have also seen steep price cuts, while unbranded local “kampung durians” are selling for barely enough to cover harvesting costs.

Many producers were already reeling from unpredictable weather before the glut hit. Durian cultivation requires very specific weather conditions at different growth stages: pollination is easily disrupted by unseasonal heavy rain or wind, trees need a month of hot weather to flower successfully, and cool temperatures for a high-quality harvest. Malaysia’s varied geography left growers unevenly impacted, with some regions facing poor harvests from bad weather even as others produced above-average yields. The combination of poor production outcomes for some and massive oversupply across the industry created a catastrophic double blow for small-scale producers.

The severity of the crisis has prompted emergency action from Malaysian authorities. The Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority has introduced emergency support measures, including purchasing durian from smallholder farmers at a guaranteed base price to protect their incomes, with officials hoping market prices will stabilize within the next few weeks. Industry leaders are also pursuing long-term changes to build a more sustainable sector. Edwyn Chiang Kyn Hoe, secretary general of the Malaysia International Durian Industry Development Association, says the group’s goal is to build a premium Malaysian durian industry that competes on quality, authenticity and geographic origin rather than rock-bottom prices. The association is currently organizing trade events in China to connect Malaysian exporters with Chinese importers, expanding market access to absorb the current surplus and strengthen the industry for future growth.

In the meantime, vendors on both sides of the border are turning to creative promotions to move their overflowing stock. A stall in Pahang, Malaysia went viral online for its “all-you-can-fit” promotion, where customers can fill an entire sack with durian for just 100 ringgit ($24). In Singapore, Durian Ninja owner Kee Eng Chai frames his daily free giveaway as a community gesture, noting that all free durian is claimed within one to two hours, while remaining portions sell for as little as S$1 ($0.74) each. Kee also hopes the low prices will draw a new generation of consumers—he notes his current customer base is mostly older Singaporeans, and the promotion is an opportunity to encourage younger people to explore different durian varieties.

On a Monday ruling in a Manhattan federal courtroom, disgraced exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui — who rebranded himself as a high-profile anti-China critic after fleeing his home country a decade ago — received a 30-year prison sentence for orchestrating one of the largest financial fraud schemes prosecuted in recent U.S. history. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the sentence, following a conviction on nine out of 12 criminal charges stemming from a five-year conspiracy that defrauded thousands of investors out of more than $1 billion.

Before the sentence was announced, Guo was given the opportunity to address the court, where he used the time to complain about his treatment in detention, claiming he had fainted early that morning, been forcibly returned to jail from a hospital against medical advice, and suffered repeated illness during transport. Through a court interpreter, he repeated his long-held stance that his core goal after moving to the United States was to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.

A self-styled dissident, Guo embedded himself in far-right U.S. political circles after arriving in New York in 2017. He developed a close public alliance with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, with the pair announcing a joint initiative to overthrow the Chinese government in 2020. Guo lived a life of extreme luxury in a Central Park-view Manhattan penthouse, gained membership at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort, and maintained his lavish lifestyle until his 2021 arrest, after which he has been held without bail.

Prosecutors had pushed for the 30-year sentence requested, arguing that Guo’s deception, which ran from 2018 to 2023, destroyed the financial and emotional well-being of hundreds of lives. During the sentencing, Judge Torres read excerpts of victim impact letters from investors who lost their entire life savings to Guo’s scheme, with many reporting crippling anxiety, broken family relationships, and long-term psychological harm. The judge noted that Guo specifically targeted people who shared his stated opposition to the Chinese government, preying on their shared political beliefs to gain their trust before scamming them. Torres emphasized that to date, Guo has refused to accept any accountability for his crimes, falsely claiming his actions caused no harm to anyone, and has incited his supporters to harass and intimidate witnesses who spoke out against him.

Prosecutors detailed in court filings that the more than $1 billion Guo raised through fraudulent investments funded his over-the-top luxury lifestyle, including multiple mansions, private yachts, high-end race cars, designer clothing, and luxury home goods. The scheme centered on three sham entities controlled by Guo: his media venture GTV Media Group Inc., the Himalaya Farm Alliance, and the Himalaya Exchange, which he pitched to thousands of followers as exclusive high-return investment opportunities.

Guo’s legal team mounted an unconventional defense ahead of sentencing, arguing their client was the target of a global conspiracy orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, which they claimed recruited U.S. elites across business, entertainment, and politics to frame him. They contended that a 30-year sentence would validate what they called a Chinese smear campaign and embolden efforts to target Chinese dissidents living abroad, noting that defendants in similar financial fraud cases typically receive sentences between two and four years. The defense also cited past physical injuries Guo claims he sustained from torture in China, which required multiple surgeries between 1993 and 2022, as a factor warranting a reduced sentence.

The U.S. Probation Department had recommended a 25-year sentence, acknowledging the more than $1 billion in total losses suffered by investors, a figure prosecutors described as “astronomical.” According to prosecution filings, Guo remains entirely unrepentant for his crimes, having taken advantage of U.S. asylum laws to build his operation in the country. “He does not even offer the lip service of remorse or acceptance of any responsibility for the harms he caused so many individuals and their loved ones, some of whom have been pushed to consider suicide as a result of his crimes,” prosecutors wrote, adding that multiple victims testified at trial that Guo brainwashed, cheated, and irreparably harmed them.

Guo’s long-standing narrative, repeated by his defense, holds that he amassed his initial wealth as his family became the largest shareholder in China’s largest publicly traded securities firm, then became a target of Chinese government officials after he exposed their corruption. Chinese authorities have previously charged Guo with crimes including rape, kidnapping, and bribery, charges Guo has always claimed are fabricated to punish him for criticizing senior Communist Party leaders.

For nearly 20 years, Wall Street has operated under a pervasive, yet fundamentally flawed assumption about China’s long-term financial ambitions. The consensus held that Beijing ultimately sought the same global financial status as Washington: control of the world’s primary reserve currency, the deepest and most liquid capital markets on the planet, and the unmatched geopolitical leverage that comes with systemic financial dominance.

Today, that long-held consensus is looking increasingly misaligned with Beijing’s actual policy choices — and if the assumption is indeed wrong, global investors are likely underestimating one of the most consequential structural shifts unfolding in international finance right now.

Signs of this revised strategy were clearly on display at this month’s Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai, an annual gathering widely viewed as China’s equivalent of the Davos World Economic Forum, where top policymakers and financial leaders gather to outline official priorities. At the event, senior Chinese officials unveiled a new suite of policy measures aimed at expanding offshore renminbi markets, strengthening cross-border financing infrastructure, boosting international participation in China’s domestic capital markets, and solidifying Shanghai’s positioning as a leading global financial hub.

Key initiatives announced included a new renminbi repurchase facility open to foreign central banks and sovereign wealth institutions, expanded offshore renminbi trading frameworks, and additional programs to deepen cross-border liquidity and payment settlement channels. Most global investors interpreted the announcements through the same lens they have used for decades: as just another incremental step in China’s long-stalled push to fully internationalize the renminbi. The market reaction was muted, with the announcements dismissed as incremental progress on a familiar goal. But this reading may turn out to be a critical misjudgment.

What many observers are missing is that China is no longer seeking to displace the U.S.-led global financial system. Instead, its core goal is to eliminate its exclusive dependence on that system. These two objectives could not be more different. One requires an all-out push to unseat the dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency. The other focuses on reducing the strategic vulnerability that comes with operating entirely within a dollar-dominated global financial order.

This distinction carries far-reaching implications for nearly every dimension of global finance: from geopolitical power dynamics and cross-border capital flows to sanctions risk management, global reserve diversification, and the long-term pricing of all classes of international financial assets.

For decades, mainstream discussion of China’s financial ambitions has revolved around a single question: Can the renminbi ever replace the dollar? The data to date strongly suggests that answer remains no, at least for the foreseeable future. The U.S. dollar still makes up roughly 58% of global foreign exchange reserves, compared to just 2% for the renminbi. It is also involved in nearly 90% of all global foreign exchange transactions. U.S. capital markets remain unrivaled in their size, depth of liquidity, strong institutional frameworks, and broad global investor confidence. By every traditional metric, dollar dominance remains firmly intact.

But Beijing’s recent policy moves make clear that displacing the dollar may no longer be its goal. Instead, China is pursuing a far more achievable, and ultimately more market-shifting, objective: building a self-controlled financial ecosystem that can operate alongside the existing dollar-based system, rather than being entirely contained within it.

Crucially, this new ecosystem does not need to replace the dollar to succeed. A useful analogy is not found in 20th century monetary history, but rather in the development of China’s digital economy. For years, Western analysts assumed China’s internet sector would eventually converge with the global open internet. Instead, Beijing built a separate, self-governing domestic ecosystem, developing its own homegrown search engines, mobile payment platforms, social media networks, cloud infrastructure providers, e-commerce giants, and independent regulatory frameworks. China never replaced the global internet — it just built a parallel system that it fully controls. Increasingly, the same logic is shaping China’s modern financial strategy.

Over the past two decades, China has quietly assembled almost all the core components required for a parallel global financial architecture. Beijing has negotiated dozens of offshore renminbi clearing agreements and more than 40 bilateral currency swap deals with central banks around the world. It developed the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which processed more than 175 trillion yuan ($24.5 trillion) in transactions in 2025, marking a 43% year-over-year increase. Today, more than 1,700 direct and indirect participants from nearly 190 countries and territories use the system.

China has also rapidly expanded cross-border renminbi settlement, advanced central bank digital currency pilot programs, and gradually opened targeted segments of its domestic capital markets to foreign investors. Meanwhile, China’s banking sector, with total assets exceeding $60 trillion, is now the largest national banking system in the world.

None of these individual developments threaten dollar dominance on their own — and they do not need to. Taken together, however, they achieve a fundamentally different strategic goal: they reduce China’s reliance on U.S.-controlled financial infrastructure, and create alternative channels for global trade, financing, liquidity provision, and investment in the event that geopolitical tensions escalate sharply.

In effect, China is building a parallel financial architecture. But unlike all previous challengers to dollar hegemony, Beijing does not seem to believe this system must replace the existing order to meet its core strategic needs.

This priority has grown far more urgent in recent years. Chinese policymakers have carefully studied the impact of Western sanctions on Iran, the financial restrictions imposed on Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and most notably, the freezing of more than $300 billion in Russian sovereign foreign exchange reserves following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Regardless of one’s perspective on these policy decisions, they made one reality undeniable: U.S. and Western financial power carries extraordinary global reach, and core components of the existing global financial system — reserve assets, payment networks, and clearing infrastructure — are no longer politically neutral.

From Beijing’s vantage point, excessive financial dependence on the West has become an unacceptable strategic vulnerability. For global investors, this shift signals that China is preparing for a future in which financial fragmentation, elevated sanctions risk, and persistent great power competition become permanent, structural features of global markets, rather than temporary disruptions.

This framework helps resolve the apparent contradiction that has long confused Western investors about China’s financial reforms. On one hand, Beijing actively courts greater international participation in its domestic capital markets. On the other, it refuses to cede control over capital flows, exchange rate policy, and critical financial infrastructure. The reality is that China may never have been pursuing traditional Western-style financial liberalization at all. Instead, it is prioritizing financial resilience — and for Beijing, resilience is a far more important goal than global financial dominance.

So while global investors continue to debate whether the renminbi will eventually displace the dollar as the world’s top reserve currency, Beijing is asking a very different question: Can China maintain stable trade financing, provide sufficient cross-border liquidity, support its global economic partners, and sustain domestic economic stability through a prolonged period of geopolitical confrontation with the U.S.?

These are fundamentally different objectives. China does not need to build a carbon copy of the U.S. financial system to reshape the global geopolitical balance, alter long-term global capital allocation, reduce the effectiveness of Western sanctions, and force markets to re-evaluate decades-old assumptions about financial globalization. It only needs to build a system that works well enough for its core needs when access to the U.S.-led system becomes uncertain.

For decades, global investors have priced assets based on the assumption that financial globalization and integration would continue to expand indefinitely. Beijing increasingly appears to be betting on the opposite outcome. While Wall Street continues to debate whether China can replace the dollar, Beijing has already concluded that it does not need to.

This analysis comes from Nigel Green, founder and chief executive officer of the deVere Group, a leading independent financial advisory firm.

Against the backdrop of a global AI boom that has sent semiconductor demand skyrocketing, South Korea has announced an ambitious, roughly $1 trillion investment strategy to scale up its domestic chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence ecosystem over the coming years. This initiative forms the core of the nation’s newly launched “Three Mega Projects”, which focuses on developing three cornerstone technology assets: new semiconductor production hubs, large-scale AI data centers, and advanced robotics infrastructure.

In a televised national address on Monday, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung framed the initiative as more than a technology push—it is a strategy to revitalize regional economies outside the overconcentrated Seoul capital area, where the vast majority of the country’s advanced industrial capacity is currently clustered. “We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country,” Lee stated during the event. “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward.”

The announcement was joined by top executives from Samsung and SK Hynix, South Korea’s two largest semiconductor manufacturers, which are set to lead the development of a new massive semiconductor production hub in the country’s southwestern region. Beyond the chip hub, the plan outlines the construction of additional AI infrastructure nodes across non-capital regions to spread economic opportunity more evenly across the country.

In pre-address remarks, Lee emphasized that the project is a matter of national economic survival, noting it addresses decades of rural decline driven by the concentration of industry and opportunity in Seoul. “Now, we must break this long-standing cycle of discrimination and marginalization—not only for the sake of justice and equity, but also to ensure sustainable and inclusive growth,” he wrote.

For Samsung and SK Group, the timing of the investment aligns with a historic windfall from the global AI infrastructure boom. Both companies count leading AI chip designer Nvidia among their key customers, and they have emerged as two of the largest beneficiaries of surging global corporate spending on AI development. SK Hynix alone saw its public market valuation top $1 trillion in May, a surge driven directly by booming demand for AI-capable memory chips from data center operators worldwide.

The current global market context underscores the urgency of South Korea’s push. U.S. tech giants including Google, Amazon, and Meta have collectively committed to $650 billion in AI technology spending this year alone. This unprecedented demand has triggered a global semiconductor shortage, pushing component prices higher across the industry. Just last week, both Apple and Microsoft raised prices on select consumer devices in response to elevated component costs.

While the plan has broad government and industry backing, it has not been without market caution. Some global investors have raised concerns about the massive flood of capital pouring into the AI and semiconductor sectors globally, a trend that has contributed to a recent pullback in technology stock prices across major markets. Regional competitors including Taiwan, China, and Japan have also announced massive similar investment programs into chip manufacturing and advanced AI technology in recent months, intensifying global competition in the sector.

Global financial markets kicked off the trading week with sharp divergence on Monday, as a renewed pullback in high-flying artificial intelligence-focused equities pulled major benchmarks in Japan and South Korea lower, while offsetting gains in other regional indexes and stabilizing oil prices kept overall losses in check. The mixed trading session comes against a backdrop of rising geopolitical risk, after fresh escalations between the United States and Iran over the weekend stoked new uncertainty for the already fragile global economic outlook.

Over the weekend, Iran responded to new U.S. airstrikes by launching a fresh wave of drone and missile attacks targeting Bahrain and Kuwait, ratcheting up tensions that have roiled global energy markets since the outbreak of conflict in late February. Currently, oil prices have edged higher in early Monday trading but remain near the levels they held before the latest Iran conflict began, even as analysts warn that complacency among traders could leave markets exposed to sudden price swings.

Japan’s Nikkei 225, one of the Asian markets that has seen the most dramatic gains from the AI boom over recent quarters, dropped 1% to close at 68,704.70 on Monday, extending a 4.2% decline from the previous Friday. Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank Group, which holds a major stake in leading AI developer OpenAI, led the downturn with a 5.9% drop, following a steep 12.5% fall in the previous trading session.

South Korea’s Kospi index also underperformed, falling 2% to settle at 8,246.50 after a 5.8% loss on Friday. Tech giant Samsung Electronics slid 6%, while major memory chipmaker SK Hynix — whose core business relies heavily on demand for AI-related components — dropped 4.5%. Both Japanese and South Korean markets have seen massive rallies over the past year, driven by soaring demand for the semiconductors and high-end components that power generative AI systems, but a recent wave of valuation concerns has trimmed those double-digit gains across the board.

Other major regional markets bucked the downward AI-driven trend, however. Taiwan’s Taiex index, which has also benefited heavily from the global AI boom thanks to its home to leading contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), gained 1.1% on Monday to recoup a portion of the 3.6% loss it posted on Friday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index jumped 2.1% to 23,153.89, while mainland China’s Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.2% higher to 4,034.08. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.4% to close at 8,798.00, and India’s Sensex held nearly steady with minimal change.

The pullback in AI-focused stocks that hit Asian markets on Monday originated on Wall Street last Friday, when valuation worries swept through the U.S. tech sector. By the close of trading on Friday, U.S. markets ended mixed: the S&P 500 slipped less than 0.1% to 7,354.02, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.2% to 25,297.62, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1% to 51,876.11. Major U.S. AI and chip stocks led the declines, with Micron Technology falling 6.7%, Intel dropping 3.4%, Nvidia sliding 1.6%, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) losing 2.1%. U.S. futures pointed to modest gains when U.S. markets reopen for the week.

In energy markets, Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, gained 0.7% to reach $73.27 per barrel in early Monday trading, while U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude rose 0.8% to $70.02 per barrel. Both benchmarks remain near the levels they traded at before the outbreak of the latest Iran conflict in late February, but analysts warn that significant upside risk remains for prices amid ongoing escalations.

“There’s still plenty of risk facing the oil market over U.S.-Iran re-escalation,” ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey noted in a client commentary released Monday. Recent attacks on commercial vessels have also raised new questions about navigation safety through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for a large share of global oil exports. The analysts argued that oil traders have become “too optimistic” about how quickly supplies from the Persian Gulf will recover following the outbreak of conflict, and that this complacency creates substantial exposure to sudden price jumps if supply recoveries lag or tensions escalate further.

In foreign exchange trading, the U.S. dollar edged slightly higher against the Japanese yen, rising to 161.81 yen from 161.71 yen in previous trading. The euro held steady, remaining unchanged at $1.1386.