More than 20 domestic land developers attended a pre-sale briefing yesterday hosted by Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) for the mail-in auction of a 1,180 ping (3,901 square meter) plot in Taipei on July 25.
Some developers at the briefing said the floor price of NT$4.2 billion (US$138 million) for the residential parcel on Jianguo S Road near Da-an Forest Park was too pricey, while others said it was reasonable.
"We think the NT$4.2 billion starting price is fairly reasonable, but we're still evaluating the price range that we'd like to bid in," Robert Lo (羅孝先), special assistant to the chairman of Kee Tai Real Estate Co (基泰建設), told the Taipei Times yesterday.
APARTMENT PROJECT
Lo expressed interest in acquiring the land for 27-story complexes to house luxury apartments, which he said would need to sell at a minimum of NT$1.2 million per ping.
"This auction will be an important indicator of whether the city's luxury home market is still stable," he said.
The 27-story housing project would create a total of approximately 6,000 ping of living space and would cost at least NT$1.8 billion, or NT$300,000 per ping, to build, Lo said.
But Lo expressed concern over a neighboring plot of land similar in size, also owned by Shin Kong, which he said could pose a pricing challenge to prospective buyers. Kee Tai has no interest in the second plot, he said.
BONUS RIGHTS
Shin Kong Life, the nation's third-largest life insurer, told potential bidders yesterday that the winning bidder would also be awarded the rights to buy the neighboring 1,310 ping lot at a 5 percent premium of the first lot's closing price per ping.
That means that the second lot would cost at least NT$4.95 billion, or NT$3.78 million per ping.
※If the winning bidder declines to buy [the other plot], we'll organize another auction to liquidate the land,§ Shin Kong vice president Chen Shih-long (陳世龍) told yesterday's briefing.
BIDDING RULES
Bidders interested in the first lot must put down a deposit of NT$500 million and send applications and accompanying documents by registered mail to Shin Kong by 9am on July 25, the insurer said.
The auction will close at 10am that day and the winning bidder will be asked to sign a contract immediately or relinquish its winning rights.
On March 2, 2006, Shin Kong Life outbid other domestic land developers to acquire the residential-zone parcel of state-owned land for NT$3.37 billion.
If the deal closes at the minimum NT$4.2 billion, or NT$3.6 million per ping, it will represent a 32 percent increase on the NT$2.74 million per ping the insurer paid for it.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS