$168 billion has been wiped off amid trade war

Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A pedestrian walks past Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s new under construction headquarters in Shenzhen, China;

Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, also known as the BATs, are China’s tech superstars. After these stocks had a solid run in 2017, market watchers expected them to challenge the market leadership on major U.S. tech names this year.

But so far, over $168 billion has collectively been wiped off the BATs’ value thanks to a cocktail of factors from the U.S.-China trade war to concerns over valuations and a regulatory crackdown from Beijing.

Alibaba shares are down over 11 percent year-to-date, Tencent has plunged 22.4 percent, while Baidu is off more than 6 percent.

In comparison, the FANGs — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet — have outperformed the BATs. Amazon is up over 64 percent year-to-date and Netflix has surged more than 91 percent. Alphabet is also higher. Facebook is the only FANG to have fallen this year, following concerns over its ability to police its platform, privacy worries and potential looming regulation.

Chinese tech stocks have been hammered in large part due to the U.S.-China trade war that has hit sentiment towards companies from the Middle Kingdom.

“For the Chinese internet giants, for many investors they effectively become a proxy for the Chinese economy… and I think that’s what you’re seeing reflected there. The numbers that we have seen for those companies fundamentally have been very strong but they’ve sorted traded en masse along with the broader Chinese market,” Heath Terry, internet equity research analyst at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.