President's profits rise
President Chain Store Corp's (統一超商), the nation's largest convenience-store operator, pretax profit rose 16.6 percent in the first quarter to NT$600.6 million from NT$515.1 million a year ago, driven by new store openings, chief financial officer Fred Chen (陳福唐) said yesterday.
The company forecasts pretax profit this year will rise 13 percent to NT$3.5 billion from NT$3.1 billion last year, he said.
President Chain, which runs 3,293 7-Eleven stores nationwide, is targeting new store growth of 8.9 percent this year, and planning to sell its entire 7 percent stake in Toppoly Optoelectronics Corp (統寶光電) to focus on its main food retail business, Chen said.
The company's focus this year will be investment in large-scale retail outlets including a 50-year BOT project with the Taipei City Government and a department store in the Hsinyi District, said Wu Kuo-hsuan (吳國軒), vice president for resource integration.
President Chain expects it to take 13 years to see return on its initial investment on the BOT project, after it starts operating in 2006, Wu said.
Lawmakers want DRAM duties
Two DDP legislators said yesterday at a press conference that the government should impose countervailing duties on imports of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips from South Korea.
Lawrence Kao (高志鵬) and Chen Tsiao-long (陳朝龍) said that South Korean manufacturers have begun to dump DRAM chips in Taiwan now that anti-dumping investigations have been instituted in the US and the EU on imports of South Korean DRAM exports.
They also called for the government's anti-dumping investigation period to be reduced from 260 days to 90 days.
TSMC, UMC cutting prices
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac-turing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) are cutting some prices to boost demand, the DigiTimes Web site reported, without saying where it obtained the information.
TSMC and UMC are lowering prices on mid-range manufacturing technology that's used to make chips with transistors measuring between 0.25 micron and 0.18 micron in width, the report said.
The price cuts have narrowed the difference between chips made with older 0.35 micron technology and 0.25 micron technology to about 10 percent, the report said, without giving the earlier price difference.
Earlier this month TSMC said first-quarter sales rose by 9.9 percent from a year ago to NT$39.3 billion. UMC said sales rose by 47.2 percent to NT$17.9 billion.
CAL rating unchanged
Taiwan Ratings Corp (台灣信評) said it has no immediate plan to change its ratings and outlook on China Airlines Co (CAL, 華航) despite the negative impact brought out by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) on the carrier.
Taiwan Ratings said in a statement that the outbreak of SARS has affected CAL's business operation, particularly its Taipei-Hong Kong route, on which it has the most frequency of flights.
But, its "ratings and outlook on a company generally reflect a medium- to long-term, instead of short-term, view on an issure's debt protection capacity," Taiwan Ratings said. "Unless SARS has a prolonged and sustained damage to CAL's financial health and liquidity status, CAL's current ratings and outlook should remain unchanged."
NT dollar dips
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday turned weak against its US counterpart, dropping NT$0.007 to close at NT$34.785 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$297 million.
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