The nation's consumer price index (CPI) rose 3.08 percent year-on-year last month on rising food, clothing and fuel prices, the government's statistics bureau said yesterday.
The inflation benchmark accelerated to a two-year high last month, adding pressure for another interest-rate increase.
Last month's figure was up a seasonally adjusted 0.78 percent month-on-month, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said.
Growth in last month's CPI compares with August's revised 1.6 percent year-on-year increase and seasonally adjusted 0.31 percent month-on-month rise.
high
"The inflation figure is quite high, surely putting pressure on the central bank to raise interest rates further," said Tony Phoo (符銘財), an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Taipei.
"We expect the central bank to raise rates by another 12.5 basis points in December," he said.
On Sept. 20, the central bank raised its benchmark rates for a 13th consecutive quarter to 3.25 percent.
Food prices, which account for a quarter of the consumer price index, climbed 7.72 percent. Transportation costs increased 0.71 percent and housing costs, including gas and rent, rose 1 percent. The price of clothes jumped 3.5 percent.
raw materials
"Retailers raised food prices because they had to pay higher prices for raw materials and energy," Rita Hsueh (
"Pastries, eggs, milk, puddings, boxed lunches and almost every daily consumer good have become more expensive lately," she said.
The core price index, which excludes prices of fresh vegetables and fruits, fishery products and energy, was up 1.94 percent last month from a year earlier and up 0.3 percent from August.
The wholesale price index (WPI) last month rose 4.63 percent year-on-year, which was up a seasonally adjusted 0.48 percent month-on-month, the DGBAS said.
In the nine months to September, the CPI rose 0.9 percent, the core price index gained 1 percent and the WPI was up 6.08 percent from a year earlier.
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
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],”
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
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