The materials sector was down over 3% at midday on Friday, leading a broad-based selloff, with all sectors trading in the red. The losses on the Australian sharemarket tracked trading on Wall Street, where the Nasdaq Composite index fell 2.2%, the S&P 500 fell 1.6%, and the Dow Jones fell 0.8%.

The S&P/ASX 200 index plunged to an intraday six-month low of 8,383.20 earlier in the trading session.

WA1 Resources (ASX:WA1) said its Luni niobium project in Western Australia has been granted major project status by the Australian government for a period of three years.