The TAIEX may see a capital injection of as much as NT$82.3 billion (US$2.6 billion) if some publicly traded companies, including 12 financial holding firms, decide to buy back their shares, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Vice Chairman Wu Tang-chieh (吳當傑) said yesterday.
“A lack of confidence is the reason behind the TAIEX’s recent nosedive,” he said. “But investors should remain calm, since the nation’s economic fundamentals remain sound.”
Wu said that while public companies’ pre-tax profits fell by NT$102 billion in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, NT$48 billion, or 8 percent of their total pre-tax profits, were allocated for employee bonuses, which “shows corporate earnings weren’t as bad as expected.”
Wu said that the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp (TWSE) and the GRETAI Securities Market have formed a task force to review measures to prop up the markets.
The task force said 91 listed companies are highly under-valued and oversold, including Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (華映), HannStar Display Corp (瀚宇彩晶) and Taiwan Business Bank (台灣企銀), making them good investments for investors who are bottom-fishing.
The task force will arrange investors’ conferences for these 91 firms.
The task force is also in talks with 92 other companies, including 25 firms trading on the GRETAI, which are qualified to buy back their shares, Wu said.
He said the commission would encourage institutional investors to buy shares with their own capital.
After the FSC advised the directors of 40 boards to buy back their shares, some NT$510 million worth of shares were bought by them, he said.
To promote sales of domestic exchange-traded funds, the investment and trust companies said they would waive transaction fees.
The Securities Investment Trust & Consulting Association (投信投顧公會) will also shorten its pre-review period for new funding plans from seven days to three, Wu said.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day