Defending the body’s monetary policy, central bank Deputy Governor George Chou (周阿定) said yesterday the exchange rate only had a limited impact on foreign trade and blamed the sharp decline in exports partly on over-concentration of high-tech products and lack of branding.
Chou made the comments after the New Taiwan dollar dropped 0.5 percent to NT$34.797 against the US currency. It is expected that the NT dollar will soon fall below NT$35, a situation that would benefit exporters but hurt importers.
“The currency rate only has a short-term influence on foreign trade,” Chou told reporters in an unscheduled briefing. “In the long run, its performance has more to do with economic fundamentals. It is not practical to count on exchange rates to boost exports.”
The local currency had devalued NT$0.169 against the greenback at end of the trading session, reversing a 0.5 percent gain a day earlier. The NT dollar has dropped 5.6 percent against the US dollar this year.
Chou said the NT dollar was relatively stable, adding that the Japanese yen, South Korean won and euro had dropped 2.09 percent, 1.8 percent and 1.58 percent respectively yesterday.
Citing a report, the deputy governor attributed rising demand for the US dollar in the last month to a new wave of capital repatriation to redeem assets at home.
Asian equity fund outflows resumed and reached US$509 million last week on concerns about the deteriorating global financial situation, Citigroup Global Markets said in a client note on yesterday, citing statistics compiled by EPFR Global, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based fund research firm.
Month-to-date, the region saw net capital outflows of US$223 million, compared with net inflows of US$404 million last month and US$208 million in December, the Citigroup note said.
Chou said Taiwan had outperformed South Korea in exports to Japan and Germany in 2007 despite a sizable deterioration in the value of the won.
The monetary regulator acknowledged, however, that over-concentration of high-tech products and a lack of branding made Taiwan more vulnerable to dropping demand than South Korea.
The top two products accounted for 44.7 percent of Taiwan’s exports in 2007 while South Korea’s weighed 34.1 percent, Chou said.
Last year, South Korea posted a 13 percent gain in exports while Taiwan edged up 3 percent, Chou said, attributing the gap to South Korea’s ability to diversify its export products.
“It seems the government could make a greater effort in encouraging firms to diversify their products and create their own brands,” Chou said.
The NT dollar opened at NT$34.628 and touched NT$34.80 during trading. Turnover was US$7.22 billion on the Taipei Forex and US$3.84 billion on the smaller Cosmos Foreign Exchange, for total transactions of US$1.106 billion, data from the two companies showed.
A dealer who declined to be named said the NT dollar would hover between NT$34.50 and NT$34.80 for one or two weeks before sinking to the NT$35 threshold, reflecting economic woes.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained