Shares of Taiwanese telephone companies, such as Chunghwa Telecom Co (
"Telecom is what we bet heavily on," said Michael Ding (
Chunghwa, the nation's largest provider of phone services, advanced 27 percent last year. Taiwan Cellular Corp (
All three surpassed the TAIEX, which rose 4.2 percent.
The phone stocks carry a higher dividend yield than the 2.9 percent yield for the TAIEX. Government-controlled Chunghwa has the highest payout at 7.1 percent. Dividends helped lift the stock's total return last year to 38 percent.
"Chunghwa is somewhat unusual in a tech-heavy market for being a very defensive play," Peter Wilmshurst of Franklin Resources Inc said in an interview last month.
The former monopoly, with sales of NT$179 billion (US$5.6 billion) last year, is the only Taiwan operator to offer a combination of Internet, fixed-line and mobile-phone services.
Taiwan Cellular's dividends yield 6.7 percent and lifted the stock's total return last year to 30 percent, according to Bloomberg's data.
Far EasTone Telecommunications pays dividends yielding 3.3 percent and handed investors a 75 percent return last year, buoyed by its purchase of smaller rival KG Telecommunications Co (和信電訊).
The telecom companies boosted earnings last year.
Chunghwa's third-quarter net income rose 5.6 percent from a year earlier to NT$13.2 billion. The increase followed a rise in average revenue per user as the company and other operators stopped offering some cheap deals and restricted handset subsidies.
Sales per Chunghwa subscriber rose to NT$740 a month from NT$719 earlier in the year as the company added corporate subscribers, Chairman Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said in a September interview.
Taiwan Cellular's net income increased 46 percent to NT$5.7 billion in the third quarter on higher earnings per user. Far EasTone, based in Taipei, posted a 74 percent increase following its NT$29.8 billion acquisition of KG Telecommunications.
Taiwan Cellular raised average revenue per user to NT$827 in August from NT$753 in December 2003. The company had 4.9 million subscribers in November.
The three mobile-phone operators are generating "reasonable" profits, Wilmshurst said.
Still, earnings may be hit as the companies spend more on new services.
Earnings per share for Chung-hwa will fall 1.7 percent this year, while Taiwan Cellular's per-share earnings will drop 9.2 percent, according to a Thomson Financial survey of 10 analysts.
A potential threat to Chung-hwa's stock price is a plan by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to reduce its 65 percent stake to less than 50 percent, Wilmshurst said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day