■ Shares close down
Taiwanese share prices closed 2.96 percent lower yesterday as Wall Street's overnight plunge and huge losses at Citigroup undermined sentiment, dealers said.
Bellwether technology stocks were also battered by Intel's decline in after-hours US trading after the world's biggest chipmaker released weaker-than-expected quarterly results, dealers said.
The TAIEX closed down 249.30 points at the day's low of 8,179.54 on turnover of NT$228.94 billion (US$7.09 billion).
Decliners outnumbered advancers 1,746 to 337, with 247 stocks unchanged. A total of 12 stocks closed limit-up, while 72 were limit-down.
Mao Jen-chieh (毛仁傑), the president of Pro Standard Capital Management (禮正證券投顧), said foreign investors apparently took a cue from Intel's weakness and offloaded local technology holdings, driving the broad market lower.
"The New York lead convinced investors to take profits after gains in the past two sessions," Mao said.
Given their heavy reliance on exports to the US, "local technology may continue to be clouded by concerns over US consumer spending."
But Mao said financials and some other old-economy stocks should continue to rise, despite some profit-taking yesterday.
■ ProMOS extends closure
ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德), Taiwan's third-biggest maker of computer-memory chips, will extend a factory maintenance shutdown this year to help curb losses after an industry glut drove prices to record lows.
"Since chip prices are not good and market demand is quite weak, we plan to let workers take more days off during the Chinese New Year holiday," Ben Tseng (曾邦助), a spokesman at the Hsinchu-based company, said yesterday.
The factory in Taichung will remain closed for 10 days, compared with three to four days in previous years, he said.
The plant will be closed from Jan. 27, Tseng said.
■ Alcatel-Lucent to share center
Telecom equipment supplier Alcatel-Lucent yesterday said it would open its WiMAX Application and Interoperability Testing (IOT) Center to local customer-premises-equipment (CPE) manufacturers, working with the Ministry of Economic Affairs to help foster a robust, mature WiMAX ecosystem.
The Taiwanese center will provide an end-to-end interoperability-testing environment for local companies producing communications equipment for businesses and residences, according to a statement.
Establishing a testing center in Taiwan will help manufacturers reduce testing costs and time to market, the company said.
The center will also leverage Alcatel-Lucent's expertise to accelerate development of a variety of high-speed multimedia applications in Taiwan, it said.
■ Sunrise to pay off debt
Sunrise Department Store (中興百貨) president Bao Pei-lin (鮑佩鈴) said yesterday the retailer would pay back 2 percent to 3 percent of last year's accumulated debt to suppliers by the end of this month, in hopes that the suppliers would provide their new spring and summer clothing collection to the Taipei store.
Bao replaced Jeff Tsai (蔡振世) as president early this month, after the company bounced NT$300 million (US$9.3 million) in checks in November. Sunrise, a subsidiary of Chung Shing Textile Co (中興紡織), owed its suppliers a total of NT$250 million last year, with outstanding loans reaching NT$640 million.
■ NT dollar loses ground
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground yesterday against the US dollar, falling NT$0.012 to close at NT$32.272. US$1.877 billion changed hands during the day's trading.
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