The New Taiwan dollar gained for the second day yesterday on speculation that exporters will increase conversion of US currency earnings from abroad at the close of the month.
The local currency dropped 0.2 percent this month, boosting the profits that exporters such as BenQ Corp (
"They need to sell US dollars at the end of the month," said Lo Chung, assistant treasury manager at the Chinese Bank (
"If it's early June, they can wait for better levels, but for now, around NT$31.40 is probably the best price that they can sell the US dollar," Lo said.
The NT dollar closed NT$0.031 up at NT$31.330 against the US dollar on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
The currency also rose on speculation that foreign investors will buy stocks before a change in a key index used to assess asset managers' performance. Morgan Stanley Capital International Inc will tomorrow raise the weighting of Taiwanese stocks in its global indexes to 100 percent from 75 percent.
Investors based overseas bought a net US$3.7 billion of Taiwanese shares this month through yesterday, the most since October 2003, according to Taiwan Stock Exchange data.
"Foreign investors may buy stocks until the day of the change, putting appreciation pressure on the currency," said Tetsuo Yoshikoshi, a market analyst at the Singapore treasury unit at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, a branch of Japan's third-biggest lender.
It may rise to NT$31.25 this week, he 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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained