Stats › Global markets and exchanges › Asia Pacific indices
Asia Pacific index returns
A stock index is really just a list of companies in one country, and countries don't move together. That sounds obvious until you see how far apart they drift. Two of the largest markets in Asia are still sitting below highs they set years ago, while a market next door to one of them just had the strongest year in its history.
This page lays out calendar year returns from 2020 to 2025 for six indices: the Hang Seng, the Shanghai Composite, the KOSPI, the Nifty 50, the ASX 200 and Canada's S&P/TSX. It also covers the two long climbs back, Hong Kong since January 2018 and Shanghai since October 2007, and it uses the Australian market to make the point about dividends, because no other index here makes it so cleanly. I put it together because most people's mental picture of world markets is really a picture of the US market with a few labels changed, and that picture is wrong in both directions. It makes good foreign years invisible and it makes bad ones unimaginable.
Two honest flags before you read on. Every column in the table is a price return, so dividends are missing from all six, and by different amounts. And there are things this page deliberately doesn't tell you, because the numbers couldn't be confirmed. The notes section says which ones and why. Sources are listed at the bottom with the dates they were pulled from, and I'd rather you went and read them than took my word for any of this.
Two of the region's largest markets are still deeply below old peaks. The Hang Seng closed at 33,223.58 on 26 January 2018 and remains more than twenty percent below that level over eight years later, despite gaining 17.67% in 2024 and 27.77% in 2025. The Shanghai Composite peaked at 6,124.04 in October 2007 and has never recovered it. Meanwhile the KOSPI returned 75.63% in 2025 and the S&P/TSX 28.25%. The Australian market makes the dividend point better than anywhere: since April 2000 the ASX 200 returned 3.93% a year excluding dividends and 8.28% including them.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 1600 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.