Despite the ripple effect on Taiwanese businesses, local academics and industry leaders have applauded China's belt-tightening measures announced earlier this year.
They pointed out, however, the risks facing China and warned Taiwanese companies to watch out for the impact of a potential increase in interest rates in the near future, driven by China's soaring consumer price index (CPI).
"I greatly applaud China's preventive steps to rein in its runway economy before an economic bubble materializes," said Chen Lee-in (
The step to suspend the establishment of new development zones could help farmers to keep lands for farming and thus have more stable economies, Chen said.
This is widely expected to moderate the rural problems that have been a headache to Beijing for decades, she added.
Tsai Horng-ming (
The measures are expected to cause industrial restructuring by eliminating ill and outmoded businesses, which are beneficial to competitive Taiwanese companies in the long run, he said.
In late April Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (
China should carefully segment and identify overproducing industries when implementing belt-tightening measures, Chen said.
For example, parts of the aluminum industry still enjoy a gross margin as high as 9 percent, which indicates no overproduction and thus should not be added to the curb list, she added.
Echoing Chen, Tsai said that as unemployment could amount to 228 million people, Beijing should keep a fine balance in undertaking such artificial controls of the economy.
"If China's annual growth rate falls below 8 percent or 9 percent, then unemployment and bad loans problems could deteriorate and cause social instability," he added.
An increasingly likely rise in interest rates in China could more bad news for China-based Taiwanese companies, experts said.
Zhou Xiaochuan (
China's CPI growth rate last month reached 4.4 percent from a year ago, according to the figures released by National Bureau of Statistics of China earlier this month.
"Taiwanese companies should watch out for their receivables from their Chinese counterparts if the interest rate increases," Tsai warned.
Considering the administrative curbs and worsening power shortages in China -- which may last for the next year or two -- Taiwanese companies could put off their plans to set up plants in China in the near future, said Luo Huai-jia (
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),