While running businesses, personal integrity and corporate governance should be made top priorities to avoid potential financial scandals, business leaders said at a seminar yesterday.
"Good ethics are good business," said Lora Ho (何麗梅), chief financial officer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電).
TSMC, the world's largest producer of made-to-order chips, regards personal integrity as the single most important quality when considering promotions of top-ranking professional managers, and the company makes thorough reference checks, Ho said at a seminar organized by the Chinese-language CommonWealth monthly magazine yesterday.
Eunice Chiu (
She said that most of the company's employees are fully aware of the company's six major management principles, of which honesty and integrity are of primary importance.
Microsoft Taiwan not only insists on financial and management transparency, but also employ compliance officers to strictly enforce the company's standard business conduct, which forbids any insider trading among employees, Chiu added.
Also stressing the importance of corporate values, former state-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (
He urged all professional managers to re-orient their management focus on business fundamentals instead of share prices.
"No management of a business should be driven by a fluctuation of share prices, which may distort the company's management goals," Mao said at the same seminar.
Securities and Futures Commission Chairman Ding Kung-hwa (
He said that it is important for the government to facilitate a legal footing and an appropriate mechanism to ensure companies thoroughly follow corporate governance principles while empowering judicial bodies to impose heavier penalties on companies which violate ethical business practices.
Once the Cabinet gives its final approval to the under-study corporate governance stature, the nation's listed companies will be required to appoint outside directors on their boards as independent supervisors to business performance, Ding added.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by