Shares drop on US worries
Share prices closed down 0.95 percent yesterday amid concerns about the US economy and a fall in Chinese stock prices, dealers said.
A move by Chinese authorities on Wednesday to cool the Chinese economy led some inestors to sell stocks, they said.
The TAIEX shed 77.91 points to close at 8,101.63, off a high of 8,300.29 and a low of 8,004.47. Turnover was NT$169.87 billion (US$5.26 billion).
Decliners outnumbered advancers 1,230 to 752, with 391 stocks unchanged. A total of 20 stocks closed limit-up, while 48 were limit-down.
Stock turnover rises 38.3%
The Taiwan Stock Exchange's stock turnover totaled NT$33.44 trillion (US$1.04 trillion) last year, up 38.3 percent from a year earlier, with transaction of electronics stocks accounting for the lion's share of 68.6 percent, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics said on its Web site on Wednesday.
The total turnover on the over-the-counter GRETAI Securities Market reached NT$8.54 trillion, up 66.4 percent from a year earlier, it said.
The benchmark TAIEX rose 8.7 percent last year, outpacing the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 6.4 percent rise, London's FTSE 100 index's 3.8 percent advance and the Nikkei-225 index's decline of 11.1 percent, the DGBAS said.
Meanwhile, NASDAQ rose 9.8 percent and Frankfurt's DAX 30 surged 22.3 percent last year, it said.
Taipower records losses
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) posted a pre-tax deficit of NT$31.2 billion (US$970 million) last year, making it the only state-run company to have operated in the red last year, a Ministry of Economic Affairs official said on Wednesday.
The number of state-owned firms reporting a pre-tax annual deficit decreased sharply from seven in 2000 to one last year after the ministry began to privatize and reform state-owned companies, the official said.
Among all the state-run companies, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油), reported the highest pre-tax surplus at NT$15.4 billion last year, albeit NT$2.7 billion short of its target because of the government's decision to stabilize commodity prices by freezing the floating oil pricing mechanism two months ago, the official said.
CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台灣國際造船) recorded a pre-tax income of NT$2.5 billion last year, while Taiwan Sugar Co's (台糖) pre-tax profit last year came in at NT$7.3 billion, the official said.
The pre-tax earnings of Taiwan Water Corp (台灣自來水) last year amounted to NT$280 million. Aerospace Industrial Development Corp (漢翔航空) posted a pre-tax profit of NT$123 million last year, falling short of its target by NT$205 million, the official said.
UPS launches new services
United Parcel Service (UPS) yesterday launched eight new services in Taiwan, including UPS Broker of Choice, UPS Returns, UPS Express Freight and UPS FTZ Facilitator, to offer a consolidated platform of services for speedy delivery, flexible parcel collecting deadline and convenient returns or replacement.
The groundbreaking UPS Clinical Trials service is designed to help the country's biotech industry deliver experiment or research materials to laboratories and pharmaceutical firms all over the world, while the UPS WorldShip 10 program allows customers trace their packages with ease, the company said.
NT dollar slide continues
The New Taiwan dollar continued to lose ground against its US counterpart yesterday, falling NT$0.006 to close at NT$32.278 on the Taipei Forex Inc. Turnover totaled US$1.002 billion.
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