Chunghwa to sell 1% share first
The government will sell a 1 percent stake in state-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) in the first quarter of this year, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday.
Previously, the ministry had said it was planning to sell up to 5.2 percent of Chunghwa Tele-com to retail investors at the end of this month or in early next month.
"We will sell the first 100 million shares to test the waters. If the market responds positively, we will continue to unload the rest," a ministry official said.
The official said no exact timetable for the sale has been set.
In December, the ministry auctioned off a 13.48 percent stake in the company to a consortium of eight local firms for nearly NT$65.39 billion (US$1.9 billion).
The ministry now holds an 81.5 percent stake in Chunghwa Telecom and has said it wants to privatize the leading telecoms operator by the end of this year.
Hon Hai plant doing well
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the nation's largest privately owned manufacturer, has begun to see positive results from its production investment in the Czech Republic, which began three years ago, a corporate spokesman said yesterday.
The first-stage manufacturing lines in the Hon Hai Czech plant had reached nearly full capacity by the end of last year and are generating 20 percent of all production from all Hon Hai manufacturing plants worldwide, the spokesman said.
The Czech plant supplies products including flat-panel displays to customers in Western Europe.
The plant posted the largest gain in terms of revenue growth among all Hon Hai plants worldwide last year, contributing some NT$50 billion (US$1.45 billion) to the Hon Hai Group's total revenues last year, according to the spokesman.
More bad loans written off
Local banks made a combined NT$104.6 billion (US$3 billion) pretax loss last year as lenders stepped up efforts to write off bad loans, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
In 2001, the banks had achieved a pretax profit of NT$57.6 billion dollars, the ministry said.
It was the first time the local banking sector reported a combined annual pretax loss since the ministry began compiling the statistics in 1994, the ministry said.
"The loss reflected the indus-try's efforts to get rid of bad loans last year," an official said.
Mutual funds' assets growing
Total assets of local mutual funds increased 22.47 percent to NT$2.18 trillion (US$62.6 billion) in 2002 from NT$1.78 trillion the previous year, the Securities Investment Trust & Consulting Association of the ROC (投信投顧公會) reported yesterday.
That increase in mutual funds -- led by bond funds -- was compared to a drop of 19.79 percent in the TAIEX and a fall of 30.72 percent in the over-the-counter index last year, as stock markets hit by the economic downturn, association chairman David Hsu (許立慶) said yesterday.
"The bond funds will continue to expand this year ... as they are viewed one of the safe-haven investments," Hsu said.
"But we hope the government to continue deregulate the market, allowing more products such as hedge funds, foreign currency bonds and pension funds in the future," he said.
NT dollar weakens
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded lower against its US counterpart, dropping NT$0.013 to close at NT$34.832 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$260 million, compared with last Friday's US$389 million.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts