WhyItDropped

KOSPI · April 29, 2003

The day Chinese demand became visible

+4.98%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Thirteen months as China started buying

early in it · 2003-03-17 → 2004-04-23, +81.67% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI rose 4.98% on the day
  • There was no single announcement; it sat in the middle of a rebound that ran through April
  • China's share of Korean exports was growing fast in this period, two years after China joined the World Trade Organization
  • The steel, chemicals and machinery China needed for factories and roads were things Korea was good at making
  • Korea's largest export destination switched from the US to China around now. The structure of the next twenty years was set here
  • Domestic spending was still poor. With the fallout from the card losses still working through, exports and domestic demand moved separately

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.