Asian currencies, including the New Taiwan dollar and Indian rupee, fell on concern about the possibility that the record high level of oil prices will spur importers to purchase more dollars to pay for the commodity.
Most Asian nations import the majority of their oil needs, with Taiwan importing 98 percent of crude usage and India about 75 percent. The NT dollar, Indian rupee and South Korean won all slipped to their lowest levels this month yesterday.
"When oil prices are rising, local oil companies tend to rush to buy crude before their prices increase further," said Tetsuo Yoshikoshi, a market analyst of the treasury unit in Singapore at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.
"That increases the demand for dollars to buy oil and weighs on Asian currencies," Sumitomo said.
The NT dollar dropped 0.3 percent to close at NT$32.576 against its US counterpart, according to Taipei Forex Inc. The rupee fell 0.1 percent to 46.2788 per US dollar, according to foreign-exchange broker Kanji Pitamber & Co. The won fell 0.1 percent to 949.3 against the greenback, according to Seoul Money Brokerage Services Ltd.
The price of crude oil has climbed 26 percent this year, and touched a record US$75.89 a barrel yesterday, after newspaper reports that militants had attacked pipelines in Nigeria, halting 120,000 barrels a day of production.
In other trading yesterday, the Indonesian rupiah was little changed at 9,100 per US dollar. The Thai baht slipped 0.1 percent to 37.91 per US dollar and the Philippine peso dropped 0.3 percent to 52.32 from 52.17 yesterday.
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