Shares rise on cautious trade
Share prices closed 1.56 percent higher yesterday on bargain hunting after recent heavy losses, but thin trading volume indicated caution amid inflation fears, dealers said.
The weighted index rose 112.7 points to 7,341.11, off a low of 7,179.24 and a high of 7,343.63, on turnover of NT$73.88 billion (US$2.43 billion).
Following a fall of more than 16 percent since the end of May, most stocks looked attractive in valuations, with market heavyweights such as financials, cements and petrochemicals in focus, dealers said.
“Valuations after recent steep declines were not able to reflect profitability of these large cap stocks. They seemed to have been oversold,” Mega Securities (兆豐證券) analyst Alex Huang (黃國偉) said.
Huang said he suspected buying came largely from major shareholders of these leading stocks to boost investor confidence amid market turbulence at home and abroad. A trader with a foreign brokerage said that government-controlled funds also played a role behind the gains.
However, Huang said daily turnover was low, indicating many investors remained sidelined because of concern over rising oil prices.
“They are watching closely when foreign institutional investors will resume buying after the massive selling,” he said.
New models boost HTC profit
High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電), the world’s largest maker of handsets using Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system, posted a 7 percent increase in second-quarter profit after releasing new models.
Its net income climbed to NT$6.44 billion (US$212 million), or NT$8.52 a share, from NT$6 billion, or NT$10.43, a year earlier, the Taoyuan-based company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. HTC was expected to post a profit of NT$6.5 billion, according to the average of nine analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
CAL chairman resigns
China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) chairman Ringo Chao (趙國帥) tendered his resignation yesterday.
Sources say that Chao wrote in the letter he intended to terminate his responsibilities at the airline with immediate effect.
Company spokesman Bruce Chen (陳鵬宇) said it was Chao’s personal decision to resign.
“Chao feels that he has completed his duties with the initiation of cross-strait charter flights. This was the goal he set for himself at China Airlines. And at the completion of this task, he feels that it is time for him to leave,” Chen said.
Envoy hopes for direct flights
Taiwanese authorities are hoping to see the start of direct flights between Taiwan and Israel to meet the growing demand driven by an increasing number of visitors and expanded business activities, Taiwanese Representative to Israel Terry Ting (丁干城) said on Sunday.
Ting said Taiwanese had made more than 6,000 visits to Israel during the first half of this year, up 118 percent from a year ago.
Meanwhile, Israelis made more than 2,000 visits to Taiwan during the same period, Ting said, adding that the total number of bilateral visits could exceed 10,000 by the end of this year.
Economic exchanges between the two countries have also expanded in recent years, with bilateral trade reaching US$1.3 billion in 2006, increasing to US$1.3 billion last year and projected to rise to US$1.4 billion next year, Ting said.
NT dollar gains ground
The New Taiwan dollar gained NT$0.002 to close at NT$30.399 against the US dollar on turnover of US$856 million yesterday.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
RSS