SHANGHAI: Stocks in mainland China and Hong Kong ell on Tuesday, dragged down by financial and property shares on renewed concerns about the impact of the cooling Chinese economy on profits.
The slowdown in China's economic growth, which hit a 24-year low in 2014, dragged on major industrial enterprises in December, with profits falling 8 percent from a year earlier, the country's statistics bureau said on Tuesday.
The CSI300 index fell 2.0 percent, ending the morning session at 3,536.59 points, while the Shanghai Composite Index fell 1.9 percent to 3,319.67 points. Both recently hit five-year highs.
"Yesterday large caps rose, so now we're seeing profit-taking," said Tian Weidong, head of research at Kaiyuan Securities in Xi'an.
The property sub-index plunged 3.3 percent and the financial and banks indexes both plummeted 3.1 percent. The energy sub-index fell 2 percent.
China CSI300 stock index futures for February fell 2.2 percent, to 3,542.8, 6.21 points above the current value of the underlying index.
In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index dropped 0.8 percent to 24,709.73 points. The Hong Kong China Enterprises Index lost 1.3 percent, to 12,067.86.
"Today we've seen a small pullback that was triggered by weakness in A-shares," said Alex Wong, director of Ample Finance Group in Hong Kong.
"I am a little bit bearish on local enterprises. The Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar so the Hong Kong dollar has strengthened a lot versus all other currencies, including the renminbi, which means lower competitiveness for local enterprises."
The index measuring price differences between dual-listed companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong stood at 127.48.
A value above 100 indicates Shanghai shares are pricing at a premium to shares in the same company trading in Hong Kong, and vice versa. Total volume of A shares traded in Shanghai was 19.85 billion shares, while Shenzhen volume was 11.74 billion shares.
Total trading volume of companies included in the HSI index was 0.6 billion shares.
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