Singapore stocks fall at open, tracking Wall Street losses; STI down 0.4%

SINGAPORE shares opened in a sea of red on Wednesday, tracking losses in other overseas markets such as the US, which saw a sharp drop on Tuesday.

The Straits Times Index (STI) declined 0.5 per cent or 14.5 points to 3,065.87 as at 9.03am. Losers outnumbered gainers 76 to 60, after 74.4 million securities worth S$73 million changed hands.

The most active counter by volume was Spackman Entertainment40E : 40E 0%, which jumped 50 per cent or 0.2 Singapore cent to 0.6 cents with 13.4 million shares changing hands.

Spackman on Tuesday said it has agreed to sell its entire Zip Cinema business - a major asset - to a subsidiary of South Korea's Kakao Corp for S$19.8 million or about 18 billion won in cash.

Other heavily traded securities include Sembcorp MarineS51 : S51 0%, which held steady at 8.3 Singapore cents, with 5.1 million shares traded, and Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, which dropped 1.3 per cent or S$0.02 to S$1.54, with 4.3 million shares changing hands.

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Banking stocks fell in early trade. DBSD05 was down 0.7 per cent or S$0.21 to S$30.13, UOBU11 dropped 0.4 per cent or S$0.10 to S$25.73, while OCBCO39 : O39 0% lost 0.5 per cent or S$0.06 to S$11.59.

Other active index counters include SingtelZ74, which declined 1.3 per cent or S$0.03 to S$2.37, and the Singapore ExchangeS68 : S68 0%, which fell 0.5 per cent or S$0.05 to S$11.59.

In the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.8 per cent to finish the day at 34,577.57, the broad-based S&P 500 fell 0.6 per cent to 4,443.05, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index shed 0.5 per cent to 15,037.76.

European shares closed 0.1 per cent lower on Tuesday, dragged down by mining, banks and luxury stocks, which followed Asian luxury counters in falling due to a fresh spike in Covid-19 cases in Fujian, China.

Elsewhere in Asia, Tokyo stocks opened lower on Wednesday. The Nikkei 225 index lost 0.7 per cent to 30,469.80 in early trade, while the broader Topix index slipped 0.8 per cent to 2,101.69.