Standard & Poor's Ratings Service yesterday released its biannual corporate report card on rated corporate issuers in the region, including China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, concluding that the region's upturning economies have led to an improvement in corporate credit quality.
"[The region's] overall credit quality has improved" since the publication of its report card in October last year, with no corporate downgrades or outlooks changing to negative between September last year and April," the report said.
"For the most part, mainland China has led the way in the current recovery highlighted by the upgrade of the sovereign credit in February 2004," said S&P's Hong Kong-based credit analyst John Bailey.
In late February, Standard & Poor's raised the sovereign rating for China from BBB/positive to BBB+/positive while saying in March that it had no plans to change its credit ratings for Taiwan despite the political upheaval following the nation's presidential election.
With China extending its recovery, there are also increasing signs of a strong rebound in Taiwan's high-tech manufacturing base, Bailey said, adding that, similarly, the outlook on Hong Kong's economy is much brighter than before.
According to the report, growth in Taiwan's industrial production has been led by the semiconductor industry, which has experienced a sustained increase in sales.
However, the political dispute arising from the election could ultimately have a negative impact on the local economy, although it's still too early to tell, Standard & Poor's said in its report.
Against the backdrop of an upcoming property recovery, weak performances by property investors in Hong Kong, which continues to experience a negative rental reversion, remain a negative factor. But Standard & Poor's noted that it will be a matter of time before rental incomes stabilize with underlying economic growth improving in Hong Kong.
Standard & Poor's report expressed concern over China's over-heated economy, saying its main challenge in future will be to slow it down, since some sectors -- including steel, autos, aluminum and property -- are exposed to overcapacity.
In the report, Bailey concluded by saying that "the future direction of corporate credit quality in greater China will depend to a large extent on how sustainable the economic recovery is in the US and how the mainland China government reacts to an overheating economy."
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS