Shares close down
Taiwanese shares closed 0.59 percent lower yesterday following heavy losses on Wall Street overnight after crude oil hit a new high above US$129 a barrel, dealers said.
Record oil prices have increased worries over Taiwan’s inflation, already under pressure as the new administration has indicated it plans to raise gasoline and utility prices, they said.
The weighted index closed down 53.32 points at 9,015.57, off a high of 9,079.91 and low of 8,973.15. Turnover was NT$138.14 billion (US$4.53 billion).
Nanya mulls selling stake
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), the nation’s second-biggest maker of computer-memory chips, is considering selling a stake in Inotera Memories Inc (華亞科技), its venture with Qimonda AG, to Micron Technology Inc.
“It’s one of the options if we buy Qimonda’s stake in Inotera,” Nanya senior vice president Moor Chen (陳宏模) said by phone yesterday.
He declined to say if Nanya and Micron, which announced last month that they would invest US$1.1 billion to form a venture to share costs, are in talks on such a sale or to comment on other options.
Nanya and Qimonda, the memory-chip unit of Infineon Technologies AG, each own about 35 percent of Taoyuan-based Inotera. The two shareholders said in March they were in talks over the future of the venture, after falling prices caused Munich-based Qimonda to scale back investments.
Taoyuan-based Nanya and Qimonda aim to finalize details on their stakes in Inotera next month, Charles Kau (高啟全), president of the venture, said by telephone yesterday.
UPS sets up shop in Shenzhen
US logistics firm United Parcel Service (UPS) said yesterday it would move to a new Asia air operations center in Shenzhen, China, by 2010 and scale back its regional hub in the Philippines.
“In the past few years the increase in trend was moving towards the north of Asia. About 75 percent of the intra-Asia package volume shifted to North Asia and the decision was made to handle the packages close to our clients,” said Andy Connelly, UPS senior vice president for the region.
From 2010 the Shenzhen airport will take most of the volume away from the UPS facility at Clark airport north of Manila, he told a news conference.
Connelly said the China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan markets accounted for more than half of UPS’ total intra-Asia volume, with a sizeable volume in southeast China and Hong Kong.
US cellphone shipments down
US cellphone shipments fell for the first time since 2005 last quarter as consumers tightened budgets to contend with slowing economic growth, researcher Strategy Analytics said.
Total shipments by manufacturers including Motorola Inc and Nokia Oyj declined 4.5 percent to 37.9 million phones, Neil Mawston, an analyst at Boston-based Strategy Analytics, said in an interview on Tuesday. Motorola and Nokia lost sales to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co and LG Electronics Inc.
“This ties in with all the subprime issues: People have less money to spend,” Mawston said.
“The upper proportion is still doing OK,” he said, referring to devices such as Apple Inc’s iPhone that surf the Web, send e-mail, play music and capture video.
The decline contrasts with growth of 19 percent in Asia in the first quarter, which helped drive global shipments up 14 percent to 282.4 million units, Strategy Analytics said. The US was the only major region where shipments declined, Mawston said.
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