■ Shares little changed
Taiwan share prices closed little changed yesterday, confined to a narrow range as Wall Street's mixed closing last Friday provided no clear lead for local investors, dealers said.
Gains in large-cap stocks because of laggard buying and expectations of industry recovery for select segments were offset by technical pressure on the rest of the market, they said.
The weighted index closed up 0.58 points or 0.01 percent at 7,884.99, off a low of 7,866.59 and a high of 7,931.99, on turnover of NT$115.04 billion (US$3.48 billion).
Kai Yuan Securities Investment Consultant (開元投顧) president Tom Tang (湯建源) said laggard interest drove large-cap stocks higher, with select stocks boosted by hopes of better industry prospects this quarter.
"Select wafer foundries, liquid crystal display panel firms and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chipmakers scored gains on hopes of better industry performance in the current quarter."
■ DVD firms settle patent fight
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, settled a DVD patent-infringement lawsuit with Taiwan's CMC Magnetics Corp (中環) and agreed to a cross-license agreement for 10 years.
Matsushita in July filed a lawsuit in the US court for California's Northern district regarding patents for rewritable discs, the Osaka-based company said in a faxed statement yesterday. Matsushita has been negotiating to license patents to CMC, the world's biggest maker of recordable DVD discs, since 2004.
"We are pleased that our intellectual property rights have been properly evaluated and this litigation was settled early to our mutual satisfaction," Yoshihisa Fukushima, director of corporate intellectual property at Matsushita, said in the statement. No financial terms were given in the statement.
CMC spokeswoman Andria Wong (翁雅貞) confirmed the settlement in a telephone interview. Wong declined to disclose the terms of the DVD license agreement.
■ Chunghwa closes limit up
Shares of Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (中華映管), the nation's third-largest liquid-crystal-display maker that was forecast to report a record loss, surged after the company replaced its chairman.
The stock rose by the 7 percent daily limit to NT$6.77, the highest in almost three months, on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Frank Lin (林鎮弘) quit as chairman last week and was replaced by his half-brother Lin Wei-Shan (林蔚山), president of Tatung Co (大同), Chunghwa Picture's biggest shareholder and Taiwan's oldest home appliance maker. The former chairman resigned for "personal reasons" at a time when the company was forecast to report a record NT$13.5 billion group net loss for last year, according to the average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg.
■ Taiwan Lottery berated
The Ministry of Finance issued a strongly written statement yesterday, demanding that Taiwan Lottery Co (台灣彩券公司) replace its information team chief or even the firm's president over the constant system failures that have plagued its vending machines.
As many as 1,400 lottery distributors nationwide were affected by a four-hour computer crash yesterday afternoon.
Taiwan Lottery, the nation's exclusive Public Welfare Lottery operator, quickly apologized for the instability of its system.
■ NT loses on greenback
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, decreasing NT$0.009 to close at NT$33.098.
A total of US$843 million changed hands during trading.
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