■ Bank to issue new coins
The central bank is set to issue 21,200 commemorative silver coins to mark the Taipei 2005 Stamp Exhibition and the 18th Asian International Stamp Exhibition to be held in Taipei from today until Wednesday, bank authorities said yesterday. The commemorative silver coin bears a picture of flying geese and the 18th Asian International Stamp Exhibition on the front side and a picture of Taipei 101 -- the tallest building in the world -- and a commemorative stamp marking the exhibition on the reverse side.
■ Taiwan, India should cooperate
Taiwan-India cooperation, particularly in the information technology field, has a huge potential to make the two countries invincible around the world, Taiwanese and Indian officials said Wednesday. At a seminar on Taiwan-India business prospects and challenges, India-Taipei Association chairman Vijay Gokhale said India provides enormous business and investment opportunities. Wu Hsin-hua (吳新華), deputy director-general of the Bureau of Foreign Trade under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said that the ministry has listed India as one of its nine foreign markets worthy of exploration by Taiwanese companies. The ministry sent two trade promotion missions to India last year, while India also dispatched a group to Taiwan, he said. Government statistics showed that Taiwanese exports to India hit more than US$1.07 million last year, while imports reached US$860 million.
■ Goldman Sachs lifts oil forecast
Goldman Sachs Group Inc raised its oil forecast for next year to US$68 a barrel and said crude will stay at about US$60 a barrel for years to come. "Even at these higher prices, reinvestment rates if anything appear to be falling not rising," according to the Aug. 17 report from analysts including Steve Strongin and Jeffrey Currie. Oil companies are wary of "shifting tax regimes in oil-rich nations, a range of technologies that could provide future supplies, labor shortages and uncertainty around access to low-cost supplies." Goldman Sachs earlier this year was criticized after it said oil prices could experience a "super spike" to US$105 a barrel should supplies be disrupted from the Middle East.
■ Matsushita overtakes LG
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co of Japan overtook South Korea's LG Electronics Inc as the world's second-largest maker of plasma display panels (PDPs) used in televisions, market researcher DisplaySearch said. Osaka-based Matsushita, which makes products under the Panasonic brand, overtook Seoul-based LG during the second quarter after increasing its share of PDPs sold worldwide to 25 percent from 14 percent in the first quarter, Austin, Texas-based DisplaySearch said in a press release, which didn't specify LG's market share. Industry leader Samsung SDI Co's market share fell to 31 percent in the quarter from 33 percent in the previous quarter, according to the statement. Falling prices helped fuel global plasma TV shipments to rise 24 percent in the second quarter from the previous quarter to a record 1.1 million units, overtaking sales of rear projection TVs for the first time, DisplaySearch said.
■ NT dollar continues to slide
The New Taiwan dollar continued trading lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.048 to close at NT$32.114 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$762 million, down from US$1 billion the day before.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by