Share prices closed little changed yesterday following a mixed performance by Wall Street on Friday and on caution ahead of results announcements by many key local firms this week, dealers said.
They said many investors avoided building positions due to the long Lunar New Year holiday, which will see the market closed from Feb. 15 to 23.
Several tech firms, including United Microelectronics Corp (聯電), AU Optronics Corp (友達光電), Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (日月光半導體) and Chi Mei Electronics Corp (奇美電子) will report their fourth quarter results this week.
The weighted index closed up 6.09 points at 7,783.12, off a low of 7,772.05 and a high of 7,823.94 on turnover of NT$75.39 billion (US$2.29 billion).
The tourism and transport sectors outperformed, gaining 5.52 percent and 3.06 percent, respectively, on comments by a government official that he is optimistic that a pact with China on cross-strait charter flights and allowing more Chinese tourists could be reached soon.
"As has been expected by many, shares went nowhere with investors staying sidelined amid a pervasive sense of caution ahead of a long string of holidays," said Oliver Fang, a Yuanta Core Pacific Securities (元大京華證券) assistant vice president who serves mainly foreign investors.
Investors who might have wanted to offload holdings must have done so already, he said.
Meanwhile, there are still seven trading sessions left before the holiday for those who want to take bets on a post-holiday upswing, he said.
"Such last-minute purchases are likely to make a stronger presence next week," he said.
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
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
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],”
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