China stocks stage comeback: Here's what you need to know

Deirdre Bose is here with that in today’s tech check. Morning, Dean. Hey, good morning, Carl. That would be Chinese stocks and you mentioned the K Web before the break, but Hong Kong’s stock index, the Hang Seng, it was the best performing major stock market in April and continued to move up another 5% nearly this week. It may be part of a broader market theme guys, what B of A calls the unwinding of the long AI long Japan short China trade weakness in chip makers certainly underscores that name seen as AI beneficiaries like AMD, Broadcom, ARM, Qualcomm, they have underperformed the broader markets over the last month. NVIDIA 2 is in the red over that period. Meanwhile, SMIC, that’s Chinas largest chip maker listed in Hong Kong has held up relatively better and it’s really the big Chinese Internet names tencentalibabajd.com PD. They have been leading the rebound suggesting that Chinas own AI trade may be gaining momentum. Of course guys, we have certainly been here before and there’s always this overarching question of whether Chinese stocks are investable at all because you never know what Beijing is going to do. On the surface, this rally does look technical, but on the AI front, the fundamentals you could argue that they are building. China is the world leader in AI research, and a study from Georgetown University published this week found that China leads the US as a top producer of research and more than half of AIS hottest fields like large language models and distributed machine learning. While the US is so far ahead in terms of developing top LL, miss China is trying, one data provider counts more than 260 startups competing to build homegrown alternatives. To our Jenna AI darlings, now Apple earnings guys, I’m not even talking about it. Another potential data point here. China sales. They’re falling. And counterpoint research says that consumers are citing the absence of major advancements in hardware and performance as a reason to refrain from getting a new iPhone. Huawei, it’s already. Offering built-in AI functions, all raising the stakes for WWDC in a few weeks.