Shares change little
Share prices closed little changed yesterday as initial losses driven by Wall Street's overnight weakness were offset by rotational interest, dealers said.
Bellwether technology stocks lost ground in line with their US counterparts but some laggard "China Concept" companies gained on the back of an appreciating yuan.
The TAIEX lost 4.29 points at 6,885.60, on turnover of NT$64.38 billion (US$1.96 billion).
Declines led gainers 527 to 505, with 204 stocks unchanged.
For the week to yesterday, the weighted index closed up 204.51 points or 3.06 percent after a 0.18 percent increase a week earlier.
Average daily turnover stood at NT$84.34 billion, compared with NT$67.61 billion previously.
Chunghwa to tout shares
State-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) is scheduled to launch a road show next week in New York and London to facilitate its overseas share sale, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
The telecommunications operator will sell 505.39 million shares in the form of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) abroad and 120 million shares to domestic investors, which in total represents a 7 percent share in Chunghwa Telecom, Deputy Minister of Finance Liu Teng-cheng (劉燈城) said.
After the share sale, the government's stock holding in Chunghwa Telecom will reduce to 34 percent from 41 percent to inject over NT$40 billion (US$1.21 billion) into state coffers, he added.
Robot growth predicted
The research and development of artificial intelligence robots could help the total output value of Taiwan's machinery industry top NT$1 trillion (US$30.4 billion) by 2009, with an annual growth rate of no less than 30 percent before 2012, the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) said yesterday.
The IDB also predicted that by 2016, A.I. robot manufacture alone could generate an output value of NT$250 billion and an export value of NT$175 billion, as well as contribute at least 1.35 percent to Taiwan's GDP, adding that 22,000 jobs could be created.
Moreover, the IDB estimated that the global production value of the robot industry could exceed that of the automobile sector worldwide by 2020, reaching some US$1.4 trillion.
Compared with Japan and South Korea, which have set the research and development of "housekeeping robots" as their key objective, the IDB said Taiwan would instead focus on "security robots," which they noted was the best choice based on the world-class capacity of Taiwan's opto-electronics, precision machinery, and information electronics.
Solarworld wins local order
Solarworld AG, Germany's second-largest solar-energy company, won an order worth 180 million euros (US$230 million) to supply solar-cell materials to customers in Taiwan and South Korea, adding to its Asian contracts.
Solarworld will supply solar wafers, slices of silicon used to make solar cells, until 2018, the Bonn-based company said yesterday in a statement. The order comes on top of a 350 million euro order in China that the company announced on Monday.
"The up-and-coming Asian states possess the highest growth solar markets in the world," chief executive officer Frank Asbeck said in the statement.
"High-tech products from Germany are very much in demand in China, South Korea and Taiwan," he said.
NT dollar weaker
The New Taiwan dollar weakened against its US counterpart yesterday, declining NT$0.045 to close at NT$32.940 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$1.011 billion.
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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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained