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Chips stocks drop on price fears, but China Steel rises
AP AND BLOOMBERG, TAIPEI
Friday, Mar 18, 2005, Page 11
Shares finished weaker yesterday after falls on Wall Street overnight, but steel stocks bucked the trend on expectations of a generous dividend payout by a major steel firm.
The TAIEX dropped 39.89 points, or 0.7 percent, to 6,032.47, with turnover of NT$59.05 billion (US$1.9 billion).
Memory chip firms fell after a newspaper reported Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (中芯), China's largest chip firm, has begun mass production of 12-inch chips, which is likely to pressure prices in coming months.
"Concerns about a weak second quarter also hurt confidence in technology stocks," said Bill Huang, a sales person at KGI Securities (中信證券).
Bucking the broad market's decline, steel stocks gained 1.2 percent as a whole.
Investors expected China Steel Corp (中鋼) to recommend a generous dividend payout yesterday.
China Steel's shares rose 0.8 percent to NT$35.90. After the market closed, the company said it will pay a cash dividend of NT$3.90 per share on last year's earnings, 30 percent higher than a year ago, according to a statement the company filed to the stock exchange.
Foreign investors sold a net NT$12.1 billion of the nation's stocks yesterday, according to stock exchange data, which drove the local currency to fall for a fifth day in Taipei.
The NT dollar fell NT$0.065 to NT$31.092 against its US counterpart.
The local currency may decline to NT$31.50 this week and then to NT$31.75, said William Chou, a foreign-exchange analyst in Taipei at Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南銀行).
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