Reflecting the bright real-estate industry outlook, Acer Group's land auction on Saturday received an overwhelmingly positive response, with 80 percent of the units sold.
Acer commissioned DTZ Debenham Tie Leung (戴德梁行), a London-listed international real-estate advisory and consultancy firm, to sell off 30 villa units on company land located in the Aspire Park (龍潭渴望園區) at Longtan, Taoyuan County.
The 17-year-old park was initiated by Acer's founder Stan Shih (
However, low occupancy rates prompted the company to sell some of the land.
Average floor prices of between NT$20,000 (US$627) and NT$30,000 per ping (3.3m2) attracted more than 350 interested participants, included 100 bidders, to the auction venue to try their luck, according to the Chinese-language Commercial Times yesterday.
The base prices were much lower than market prices in the area, where the average price per ping is more than NT$50,000.
According to DTZ, the 30-unit property covers an area of 46,000 pings, with a value of NT$500 million based on floor prices.
The auction on Saturday sold 24 units, with a total value of NT$180 million.
The average price per ping was NT$34,900, or 16 percent higher than the average floor price.
One of the hottest bidding wars was over a 268-ping unit, which had a base price of NT$6.15 million. It was finally sold for NT$8.9 million on the 56th bid, according to the paper.
The remaining unsold properties were mainly those covering more than 2,000 pings with floor prices above NT$50 million, it said.
Acer is set to divide the remaining land into smaller units for a second auction in July, the paper said.
Macquarie Research Equities, which earlier projected that house prices in Taipei City and Taipei County would rise further in coming quarters on sustained demand and limited supply, remains positive on this market.
"Taipei will be the only area to see price increases while declines will occur in others due to oversupply," the firm said in a report released last week.
The housing market followed this pattern for the first three months of the year.
While primary market house prices fell 0.4 percent on a quarterly basis in southern Taiwan during the period, prices rose 2.8 percent and 4.1 percent in Taipei City and Taipei County respectively, it said.
Land auctions in Taipei City in March prompted a rush to buy homes, as many people feared prices might increase further.
A fall in supply also helped to lift prices, according to Macquarie.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to