Share prices close up
Share prices closed up 0.34 percent yesterday, recovering some earlier losses sustained in the global market rout, dealers said.
The weighted index was up 18.96 points at 5,524.66, on turnover of NT$59.25 billion (US$1.85 billion).
Losers led gainers by 863 to 714 with 397 stocks unchanged.
The market opened 2.8 percent lower, after closing down 4.12 percent to 5,505.70 at a four-year low on Monday as a result of fears over a global economic meltdown.
Mega announces writedown
Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控), the nation’s third-biggest finance company by market value, said its brokerage unit wrote down the value of its Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc bonds, totaling about US$15.4 million.
Taipei-based Mega Financial made the disclosure in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Pay-TV subscribers rising
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) expects subscribers for its pay-TV services to expand to a break-even level of 800,000 households in the second quarter of next year, a company executive said yesterday.
Chunghwa Telecom has been trying to boost subscription by offering more high-quality digital content, including live broadcasts of the Beijing Olympics in August, for Internet TV customers, although the Internet TV business accounted for a minimal portion of its revenues.
That helped increase subscribers, bringing the total number of subscribers to nearly 600,000, said Chao Min (趙敏), director of Chunghwa Telecom’s digital content development department.
Chunghwa Telecom signed a contract yesterday with Fox International Channels to add three popular channels to the 83 channels included in its multimedia-on-demand platform.
Fox will pay NT$400,000 in carriage fees for each channel per year, Chao said.
Nan Shan to issue shares
American International Group Inc’s (AIG) local life insurance unit, Nan Shan Life Insurance Co (南山人壽), plans to raise NT$47.2 billion in a rights offer to meet the government’s capital requirements.
Nan Shan, 95 percent owned by AIG, plans to sell 472.2 million new shares at NT$100 each. Existing shareholders can subscribe for three new shares for every two held, the company said in a statement on its Web site.
The share sale, approved by Nan Shan’s board on Friday, will raise cash and boost the risk-based capital ratio, according to the statement. The government requires insurers to have a minimum ratio of 200 percent.
Government auctions lender
The government auctioned off Asia Trust and Investment Corp (亞洲信託) to Standard Chartered Bank yesterday for NT$3.348 billion, the Central Deposit Insurance Corp (CDIC, 中央存保) announced.
Another auction, for Asia Trust’s impaired assets, was set for this morning, CDIC said.
The auction failed in the first two rounds of bidding, after no buyers offered higher prices than the government’s floor prices to acquire the lender’s headquarters, seven branches, assets and debts.
The CDIC took over Asia Trust on Jan. 31, after the lender reported a negative net worth of NT$262 million at the end of last year and offered no concrete plan to raise sufficient capital.
NT dollar loses ground
The NT dollar lost ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, declining NT$0.007 to close at NT$32.35.
A total of US$1.614 million changed hands during the day’s trading.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to