Taiwanese shares nearly flat
Taiwanese shares closed up 0.15 percent yesterday after a tug of war between profit taking and interest in select electronic stocks, dealers said.
The weighted index rose 6.74 points to 4,460.49, off a low of 4,419.03 and a high of 4,476.33, on turnover of NT$57.75 billion (US$1.73 billion).
Shinsei to buy Jih Sun
Shinsei Bank Ltd, the Japanese buyer of General Electric Co’s local consumer-finance businesses, plans to invest NT$10 billion (US$300 million) to gain control of Taiwan’s Jih Sun Financial Holdings Co (日盛金控).
The capital injection will bring Jih Sun’s outstanding share capital to about NT$30 billion from NT$20 billion at present and improve its capital-adequacy ratio, Clements Chung (鍾芳程), a spokesman for the Taipei-based company, said by phone yesterday.
The Tokyo-based lender is already Jih Sun’s biggest shareholder with a stake of about 33 percent, Chung said.
Gas, diesel down NT$0.1
Domestic gasoline and diesel prices will both be lowered by NT$0.1 per liter, effective today, state-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) announced yesterday.
After the adjustment, CPC’s price for 1 liter of 98-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$22.8, 95-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$21.3, and 92-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$20.6. Diesel will be priced at NT$17.3.
Marubeni to buy Hsin Tao stake
Marubeni Corp, a Japanese trading house, said it has signed an agreement to buy a 21 percent share in Hsin Tao Power Corp (新桃電力), the operator of a 600-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant in northern Taiwan, for US$77 million.
Taiwanese lenders will supply US$34 million for the purchase through a syndicate loan, Marubeni said in a statement released in Tokyo yesterday.
Airlines expand services
Taiwanese airlines said Friday they would expand direct services to three more Chinese cities starting next month amid closer cross-strait economic ties. China Airlines (華航) and its unit Mandarin Airlines (華信) will offer four and two flights weekly to Shenzhen and Hangzhou, respectively, the companies said.
Rival EVA Airways (長榮) and its subsidiary UNI Airways (立榮) will operate five and four flights per week to Shenzhen and Hangzhou, respectively, while TransAsia Airways (復興) will fly to Dalian in northeast China.
The airlines will also increase the number of flights to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Nanjing.
Family Mart to invest NT$4bn
Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店), the nation’s second-largest convenience store chain, said on Thursday it planned to invest NT$4 billion (US$120.11 million) in the next three years to add 500 stores to its existing network in an attempt to increase its current 25 percent market share to 30 percent.
Taiwan FamilyMart president Chang Jen-dung (張仁敦) said the company planned to boost its number of stores to 2,800 in three years, while its annual revenue was expected to reach NT$50 billion by 2011.
FamilyMart’s revenue in the first 10 months of this year grew 14.4 percent year-on-year to NT$31.85 billion. Net profit in the first three quarters rose 27 percent year-on-year to NT$555 million, with NT$2.48 earnings per share.
NT dollar gains ground again
The New Taiwan dollar continued gaining ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange Friday, rising NT$0.007 to close at NT$33.295. Turnover was US$627 million.
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