■ TAIEX closes slightly down
Share prices closed 0.84 percent lower yesterday as further weakness in the New Taiwan dollar and fears of margin calls weighed down the market further, dealers said.
A lackluster Wall Street overnight and the central bank's in-line decision to hike interest rates by 12.5 basis points provided no support, with a weakening currency suggesting foreign investors may be taking their money out of the country, they added.
The TAIEX closed down 51.32 points at 6,031.24, on turnover of NT$60.61 billion (US$1.85 billion).
The NT dollar dropped NT$0.098 to close at NT$32.931 against the US dollar on the Taipei foreign exchange market yesterday.
■ Vietnam OKs steel factory
Vietnam has given approval to a Taiwan company to build a US$650 million stainless steel factory in southern Vietnam, an official said yesterday.
Chien Shing Stainless Steel Co (千興) will invest in the project to be located in My Xuan A industrial zone, in Ba Ria-Vung Tau province, a provincial official said.
The factory would produce 720,000 tonnes of hot and cold-rolled steel per year with 80 percent of the output earmarked for export.
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