The New Taiwan dollar declined by the most in more than a week on concern the global economic slowdown will cut demand for Taiwan’s electronics exports. Bonds rose.
The currency fell against the US dollar as a report last week showed exports fell 8.3 percent last month from a year earlier, the biggest drop in more than three years, on weaker demand from China.
“The market is consolidating holdings for the time being, both in stocks and currencies,” said Irene Cheung, a corporate director for local-markets trading at ABN Amro Bank NV in Singapore. “There will be further downside in the Taiwan dollar. The market is looking at the real problems that the economy is facing.”
The currency fell 0.2 percent to NT$32.874 as of the 4pm close, Taipei Forex Inc said. It earlier touched NT$32.898.
The government might help chipmakers with short-term financing, the Chinese-language United Evening News reported on Monday, citing Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥).
Taiwan’s 10-year bonds rose on speculation the central bank will cut interest rates.
Ten-year bond yields fell to the lowest since January 2006 after the central bank cut interest rates for the fourth time in seven weeks on Friday and said “the risk of an economic slowdown has risen.”
“Bonds are in a long-term bull market,” said Sam Chang, a debt trader at Polaris Securities Co (寶來證券) in Taipei. “The central bank will probably keep cutting interest rates.”
The yield on the benchmark 2.125 percent bond maturing September 2018 declined 7.7 basis points to 1.743 percent as of the 1:30pm close in Taipei, the GRETAI Securities Market said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
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