Shares of High Tech Computer Corp (宏達電) shot up by the 7 percent daily limit yesterday after a foreign investment researcher raised its target price more than 30 percent, to NT$653 (US$20), on strong demand for its products.
"The demand for High Tech's PDAs and smart phones has exceeded our anticipation," Vincent Chen (
The stock price of High Tech rocketed to set an all-time high at NT$551 yesterday on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, making it the most expensive stock among the 700 stocks trading on the nation's main bourse.
Turnover of the stock hit NT$6.85 billion, the highest among listed companies, according to statistics complied by the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
High Tech was also riding on a favorable macro environment, as the benchmark index TAIEX yesterday climbed 1.47 percent to 6,350.69 points with heavy turnover of NT$128.8 billion, hitting the highest level this year.
Chen said robust sales in October and last month reflected ongoing solid demand for its smart phones from telecom operator clients and original design manufacturing customers.
"The growth drivers for High Tech in 2006 include a push from operators for 3G, PDAs, smart phones and the launch of Microsoft's Direct Push Email, which competes with RIM's popular Blackberry system," Chen said.
On top of that, High Tech is expanding its client portfolio. Chen said High Tech will start supplying handsets to Japan's biggest cell phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo Inc, in the second half of next year.
High Tech, the world's biggest maker of smart phones operating on the Microsoft operating system, now supplies cellular phones to several European telecom operators including Vodafone Group PLC and handheld brands such as Palm.
As a result, Chen raised the 12-month target price for High Tech to NT$653 on Thursday from his previous NT$488, reiterating a "buy" rating on the stock.
CLSA's Chen also adjusted upwardly his financial forecast for High Tech for this year and next year by around 9 percent and 34 percent on the back of solid prospects.
The revised earnings for this year and next year are NT$10.86 billion, or NT$31.29 per share, and NT$17.94 billion, or NT$50.26 a share.
The rally spread to the over-the-counter Gretai Securities Market. Shares of the nation's top contract handset maker Compal Communications Inc (
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts