Kuo Tai-cheng passes on
Kuo Tai-cheng (郭台成), former chairman of Foxconn Technology Co (鴻準) and brother of Terry Gou (郭台銘), Taiwan's second-richest man, died yesterday of cancer, a company spokesman said.
Kuo, born in 1961, died at 2:17pm in a Beijing hospital accompanied by his wife and brother, said Edmund Ding (丁祁安), spokesman for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密). Foxconn Technology is an affiliate of Hon Hai, of which Gou is chairman.
Kuo stepped down as chairman of Taipei-based Foxconn on May 19, according to a filing to the Taiwan stock exchange. The statement did not state a reason for his resignation.
Nokia chooses Synnex
Nokia of Finland plans to boost its presence in Taiwan by using Synnex Technology International Corp (聯強), as the "fulfilment distributor" for Nokia cellphones, a newspaper reported yesterday.
The Commercial Times said that the announcement came after Synnex had been dismissed by Chunghwa Telecom (中華電信) as its cellphone distributor.
Nokia sells about 17 million cellphones each year in Taiwan and commands about 30 percent of the market. Synnex will not only handle Nokia cellphone sales, but also take care of logistics.
P/E ratio of stocks up
The average price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) of stocks listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange was 20.26 at the end of last month, up by 18.47 compared with the end of May, statistics showed.
Financial stocks had the highest P/E ratio among all sectors at 49.16, while steelmakers posted the lowest P/E ratio of 8.97.
The average yield of all stocks listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange dropped from 4.29 percent in May to 3.93 percent last month, the stock regulator said. The average price-to-book ratio climbed from 1.9 in May to 2.06 last month, the statistics showed.
Vietnam approves investment
The Vietnamese government has approved an investment project proposed by Taiwan's Chinfon Trading Group (慶豐貿易集團) to produce compact trucks, vans and motorbikes in southern Vietnam, a Vietnamese daily reported yesterday.
Chinfon Trading Group, which has already invested more than US$700 million in 26 investment projects in Vietnam, is planning to channel another US$78 million into the country, the report said.
The report said Chinfon had submitted the investment proposal two years ago, planning to produce 10,000 trucks and vans per year. Construction of the factory is expected to start before the end of this year.
The Chinfon Trading Group has in the past invested in banking, cement processing, shrimp farming and the health industry in Vietnam.
Taiwan is the largest source of foreign investment for Vietnam.
Memory makers' shares rise
Shares of Samsung Electronics Co, Hynix Semiconductor Inc and other computer memory chipmakers rose on optimism that prices of the product will rise and boost earnings this quarter.
Chipmakers will raise prices of dynamic-random-access memory, or DRAM, by at least 10 percent this month from last month, Dramexchange.com (集邦科技), Asia's biggest spot market for the chips, said in a statement yesterday. That would be the biggest increase since March last year, Taipei-based DRAMeXchange said.
Prices have plunged more than 60 percent this year, eroding earnings at DRAM companies.
In Taiwan, Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), the nation's biggest DRAM maker, advanced 1.7 percent, while Nanya Technology Corp's (南亞科技) stock rose 1.6 percent to close at an almost five-year high.
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
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
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
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