■ Beijing policy hurts CMC profits
China Motor Corp (中華汽車), Taiwan's biggest carmaker, said it will miss its profit target for this year because China's moves to slow the growth pace of its economy has caused vehicles sales to plunge. "It's falling because of the slowdown in China's economy, hurting our car sales," company president Huang Wen-cheng (黃文成) said in Taipei. "The impact of China's tightening policy is far greater than we expected," Huang said. China Motor's vehicle sales, including those of the Lioncel compact cars, may fall by 10 percent to 80,000 units this year in China, causing the Taipei-based carmaker to miss its 2004 sales target by almost a third. The carmaker said it won't be able to meet the NT$7 billion (US$206.5 million) of pretax profit it said it would earn this year. China Motor sold about 50,000 cars in China in the first eight months, Huang said. China Motor has been selling fewer cars in the world's third-largest vehicle market, as total sales slowed from last year's 76 percent expansion and from the 50 percent growth in 2002. Total car sales may grow by a quarter this year, according to China's government forecasts. China Motor's profit will decline by less than 20 percent from its previous forecast, a threshold that will compel the company to file a disclosure with the Taiwan Stock Exchange to revise its profit forecast, company spokesman Hsu Li-min (許利民) said.
■ Asia tops for broadband: ITU
Asia is home to four of the top seven countries for high-speed Internet usage as companies such as auctioneer Yahoo Japan Corp and KT Corp, South Korea's leading access provider, sign up more users, a report said. South Korea is the world's leader, with 23.3 subscribers of high-speed Internet access per 100 inhabitants, according to the International Telecommunication Union report. Hong Kong is second, with 18 out of 100 people, while Taiwan ranks fifth and Japan seventh. In the three years ended 2003, the number of high-speed Internet subscribers across Asia rose 90 percent annually to 42 million, said the group's study, which was released at a conference in Busan, South Korea. In terms of mobile phones, the number of subscribers rose an average of 31 percent per year between 2000 and 2003 to 560 million, the report said, putting Asia ahead of North America as the world's largest market.
There is room for further growth because some 16 out of 100 people in Asia have cell phones, compared with 52 in Europe and 35 in the Americas, the report said.
■ Chipmakers may boost profits
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) and Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), Taiwan's lar-gest makers of memory chips, may lift their profits later this year with improvements in their production technology, a Taipei-based business daily said, without saying where it obtained the information. The companies have cut costs by a fifth by increasing output of chips made with smaller gaps between transistors, the report said. Semiconductor makers can cut costs by shrinking the size of their chips and fitting more on a silicon wafer. Nanya and Powerchip have shifted about 60 percent of their production to 0.11-micron technology, the report said.
■ NT dollar higher
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded higher against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.004 to close at NT$33.929 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$466.5 million.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure