S. Korea's Equity Benchmark To Reach 4,000 In Next 12 Months: Jpmorgan

(MENAFN- IANS) Seoul, Sep 29 (IANS) South Korea's stock benchmark is expected to reach around 4,000 in the next 12 months, an analyst from JPMorgan Chase said on Monday.

"Our cost per target for the next 12 months is about 4,000, but we have a good case scenario for the cost per target going into 5,000 and maybe even beyond," said Mixo Das, head of Korea equity strategy at JPMorgan, reports Yonhap news agency.

The analyst laid out three reasons to back his assessment, including the coordinated global easing of monetary policies, which, he said, began with the United States.

"At a global level, we are very bullish on risk assets right now," Das said while speaking in a session at the Korea Capital Market Conference, a two-day meeting that began earlier in the day in Seoul.

"So we expect to see investors chasing risky assets and equities, and this probably is going to be a global phenomenon," he added.

The JPMorgan analyst highlighted Korea's competitiveness in cutting-edge technologies, such as defense, shipbuilding and high bandwidth memory used in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, as another reason for the positive outlook.

He noted such sectors are unlikely to lose their share in the global market, underscoring that most of them are national security-sensitive industries protected by the government against Chinese competition.

Das, however, argued that to further boost investor confidence, Korean companies should strengthen their returns to shareholders, and that ongoing government policy initiatives, such as its pending corporate code reform, should take a positive direction.

"So from many investors' perspectives, it is now a point in time where they need to wait and watch and see how these regulations or regulatory companies are executed," he said.

The event, hosted by the Korea Exchange (KRX), brought together officials from local and global financial institutions.

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