■ STOCK MARKET
Market value down 9.4%
Taiwan's listed companies' aggregate market value reached NT$20.15 trillion (US$611.8 billion) on Friday, a decline of NT$2.08 trillion or 9.4 percent from NT$22.23 trillion on Aug. 10, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement on its Web site on Friday. Among the various sectors, the glass and ceramics sub-index showed the largest increase, rising 2.7 percent to NT$65.31 billion this week, the exchange's data showed. Meanwhile, the biotech and medical sub-index posted the largest drop, falling 15.2 percent to NT$72.73 billion. For the week ending on Friday, the benchmark TAIEX dropped 841.02 points or 9.4 percent amid concerns of a global credit crunch would derail economic growth.
■ STOCK MARKET
China issues trading curbs
The Shanghai Stock Exchange said it will suspend trading of shares with unusual price movements as part of its drive to curb speculation and insider trading. Shares of companies that aren't subject to a 10 percent daily cap on the day of trading will be suspended for no more than 30 minutes, if they rise more than 100 percent or drop more than 50 percent from opening prices, effective on Sept. 1, the exchange said yesterday in a statement. China's securities regulator has stepped up a crackdown on excesses in the nation's equity markets, whose benchmark CSI 300 Index has more than doubled this year.
■ INVESTMENT
Berkshire buys rail shares
Legendary investor Warren Buffett's company bought another 1.4 million shares of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp last week to gain control of nearly 12 percent of the US' No. 2 railroad. Berkshire Hathaway Inc revealed its two latest railroad stock purchases in documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission late on Friday. Buffett has said railroads have become an appealing investment because those businesses have a better competitive position today than in past years.
■ BUSINESS
Hawaii most costly US state
Hawaii is the most expensive state in the US, by far, for doing business, a report by the Milken Institute said. It is the third straight year Hawaii ranked No. 1 on the independent economic think tank's annual Cost-Of-Doing Business Index, which measures wages, taxes, electricity costs and real estate costs for industrial and office space. New York (130.9) ranked second, followed by Alaska (130.8) and Massachusetts (130.6), all with costs of doing business about 31 percent above the national average. Hawaii had the highest electricity and industrial space costs and ranked second in tax burden. Wages in the islands, however, ranked 22.
■ TELECOMS
EBay says Skype fixed
EBay Inc has fixed some technical problems that has kept millions of users from logging on to its Skype Internet phone and chat service. "The situation continues to improve," Skype spokesman Villu Arak said on the company's blog. "The sign-on problems have been resolved." Yesterday morning, only about 2.6 million Skype users were online as of 9am London time, compared with "better days" when about 8 million or 9 million users are online, Arak said in an earlier posting on Skype's blog. While users of Luxembourg-based Skype can sign on, other features such as chat and presence "may still take a few more hours to be fully operational," the company's blog stated.
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