The nation's rising real estate prices are expected to continue their upward march in the Year of the Pig on expectations of the opening up of Taiwan to Chinese tourists and continuous capital inflow, a local developer said yesterday.
"There are signs signaling that it is still a bull market in the real estate sector in the Year of the Pig," Lai Cheng-i (
Indicators include a rising mortgage loan balance exceeding NT$4.4 trillion (US$133.7 billion) at the end of last year, and a construction lending balance hitting a record high of NT$849.5 billion. This showed there was a strong demand and corresponding supply, as well as abundant capital in the market, depressing interest rates, Lai said.
Capital inflow by overseas Taiwanese companies and foreign investors in anticipation of further cross-strait liberalization -- Chinese tourists, holiday chartered flights and eventually regular direct flights -- would also bolster the property market, he added.
Chinese tourists on average have the second highest travel budgets worldwide after Japan, the statement said, citing a survey by the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台經院).
The average retail spending of each Chinese tourist is estimated at US$987 per trip, or one-third of the total travel budget, the highest in the world.
The number of Chinese travelers to Hong Kong in 2004 was 12.2 million, whose consumption accounted for 12 percent of total retail sales in the territory that year and helped create 16,500 new jobs, the survey said.
"This will not only help the local tourism industry but also bolster strong demand for commercial property for the development of department stores and office buildings," Lai said.
Commercial buildings in the greater Taipei and Taichung areas will be popular targets for foreign investors this year, he predicted.
In turn, housing prices could see a 5 percent to 10 percent markup in Taipei City in the first quarter, which could further strengthen later this year, Lai said.
Similarly, Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (
Shin Kong planned to launch an upscale housing project in Taichung this year, he said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS