Tokyo stocks fall after Trump news briefing

Tokyo stocks opened lower Thursday as investors were left disappointed by the lack of details about stimulus spending in US president-elect Donald Trump's first official news briefing.

Major exporters including automakers Toyota and Nissan were also hit by a pick up in the yen, while drugmakers followed their US peers south after Trump lambasted pharmaceutical firms for "getting away with murder" in offshoring production capacity and overcharging for drugs.

As he held his first news conference since being elected US president, Trump on Wednesday promised to be "the greatest jobs producer that God ever created", but supplied few details.

Trump's November election win had stirred hopes for big stimulus spending in the world's top economy and set off a global equity market rally.

"We're really not going to know what the effect of new policies, particularly on the fiscal side, is actually going to be and how quickly it's going to work its way into the economy," Kathleen Gaffney, the Boston-based co-director of diversified fixed income at Eaton Vance Management, told Bloomberg TV.

Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei 225 index fell 0.49 percent, or 94.18 points, to 19,270.49 in early trading, while the Topix index of all first-section issues fell 0.34 percent, or 5.32 points, to 1,545.08.

In currency markets, the dollar weakened to 114.99 yen early Thursday, down from 115.40 yen in New York on Wednesday afternoon and 116.06 yen in Asia earlier Wednesday.

A stronger yen hurts Japanese exporters as it makes their products more expensive abroad and reduces the value of repatriated profits.

Nintendo shares fell 1.05 percent to 24,880 yen while Toyota dropped 1.49 percent to 6,809 yen.

Toshiba dived 3.02 percent to 292 yen after Kyodo News reported late Wednesday that the troubled conglomerate could be hit by bigger-than-expected losses at its US nuclear unit.

Toshiba is finalising the size of special losses at Westinghouse, which could reach tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars), on top of a previously warned one-time shortfall of several billion dollars, the Japanese news agency quoted anonymous sources as saying.

Takeda Pharmaceutical lost 2.27 percent to sit at 4,857 yen while rival Astellas was down 3.86 percent at 1,605.5 yen.

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