TAIEX falls on Wall Street woes
Shares closed down 1.17 percent yesterday on uncertainty over the US government’s massive bank bailout plan, dealers said.
The weighted index fell 71.77 points to 6,060.83 on turnover of NT$73.01 billion (US$2.28 billion). Decliners outnumbered gainers 1,232 to 490, with 363 stocks unchanged. A total of 34 stocks closed limit-up, while 36 were limit-down.
Music download option offered
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) unveiled a new music downloading service yesterday as part of its greater efforts to offset falling voice revenues.
It is offering more than 10,000 Chinese and English songs for cellphone users to download to use as ring tones, or for other uses, by singing the song to the phone instead of entering the songs’ codes on the phones’ keypads.
Chunghwa Telecom said it has raised the revenue target from music downloading for this year to NT$7 billion from NT$6.5 billion for this year as voice revenues declined.
Downloads are the second-largest value-added-service used by subscribers, after short messages, making about 20 percent of the total value-added-service revenues, the company said.
Chunghwa Telecom aims to make NT$75 billion revenues this year, with 10 percent coming from value-added services.
BenQ sees sales dropping
BenQ Corp (明基), the branded electronics subsidiary of Taiwan’s Qisda Corp (佳世達), said sales this year will be 15 percent less than earlier forecast because of a worldwide economic slowdown.
“The slowing global economy is really hurting demand, especially in Western Europe which accounts for 30 to 40 percent of our sales,” BenQ president Conway Lee (李文德) said yesterday.
The company had previously forecast sales of NT$80 billion this year, climbing to NT$100 billion next year.
Short-selling ban pays off
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said yesterday that its ban imposed last weekend on short selling of the shares of 150 companies below their closing prices had effectively restrained stock declines.
The volumes of short selling by lending securities between Monday and Wednesday fell below its monthly average, FSC Vice Chairman Wu Tang-chieh (吳當傑) told a media briefing.
Wu said that this month’s averaged volume of short selling by securities lending accounted for 0.89 percent of the TAIEX’s daily turnover. But such volumes dropped significantly to 0.22 percent on Monday, 0.43 percent on Tuesday and 0.25 percent on Wednesday, he said.
Wu said short selling for all TAIEX shares is banned.
Asset quality improving
New statistics showed that asset quality improved slightly last month, with the bad-loan ratio declining to 1.53 percent from 1.54 percent in July, the FSC said yesterday.
As of last month, 37 domestic banks had granted NT$18.28 trillion in loans, up NT$66.6 billion from July. Of those loans, NT$280.2 billion turned non-performing, the commission said in a statement.
Of the 37 banks, 29 banks had a bad-loan ratio of below 2.5 percent and another 6 banks’ ratio ranged between 2.5 percent and 5 percent, while Chinfon Commercial Bank (慶豐銀行) continued to hold the highest ratio of 29.26 percent, followed by Cosmos Bank Taiwan’s (萬泰銀行) 5.05 percent, the FSC said.
NT dollar slides
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, falling NT$0.037 to close at NT$31.998. Turnover was US$1.05 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
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