The Nikkei index records its worst quarterly performance in a year

The Japanese Nikkei index ended the last trading session of a turbulent week with a slight decline on Friday, and oscillated between rise and fall during the session, thus recording the worst quarterly performance since mid-2022.

The selling of shipping company shares after the right to distribute cash dividends expired, and the decline in energy company shares, which tracked the fall in crude oil prices, erased the effect of gains achieved by chip company shares and shares of companies that rose after their Wall Street counterparts rose overnight.

The Nikkei fell 0.05 percent, recording 31,857.62 points, bringing the index’s weekly losses to 1.68 percent. As for the broader Topix index, which does not focus as much on technology company stocks, it fell 0.92 percent for the day and 2.23 percent for the week.

The Nikkei index lost more than four percent this quarter, the first quarterly decline since last September and the largest since the previous June.

The index reached its highest level since the beginning of the 1990s, recording 33,772.89 points in mid-June, and has declined by about five percent since the most recent peak in the middle of this month.

Shipping company shares, which pay the highest cash dividends among Japanese stocks, fell 4.38 percent, becoming the worst performers by a large margin among all 33 sub-sectors of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Shares of oil and coal companies fell 2.92 percent.

On the Nikkei index, technology stocks represented the only bright spot in performance, and stocks of major semiconductor companies enabled the index to avoid a greater decline.

Advantest, a maker of chip testing equipment, rose 2.98 percent, and Tokyo Electron rose 2.58 percent.