TAIEX gains ground
The TAIEX rose 0.55 percent yesterday as activity in small caps offset losses in large cap companies, dealers said.
The weighted index finished up 24.82 points at 4,518.56 on turnover of NT$58.83 billion (US$1.7 billion). Losers outnumbered gainers 802 to 715, while 284 stocks remained unchanged.
Non-performing loans decline
The non-performing loan ratio of credit card lending continued to decrease to 1.51 percent last month, down 0.08 percentage points from a month ago and 0.34 percentage points from a year earlier, statistics released by the Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday showed.
The number of cards in circulation last month also shrank to 33.36 million, a 7.7 percent year-on-year decline, while the outstanding amount of revolving credit dropped NT$1.4 billion, or 0.55 percent from the previous month, to NT$252.3 billion, the statistics showed.
Meanwhile, the bad loan ratio on cash card lending last month slid by 0.087 percentage points month-on-month to 3.499 percent, the commission’s data showed.
The number of activated cash cards dropped 1.8 percent month-on-month to 1.09 million, while outstanding lending plunged 30.1 percent from a year earlier to NT$84.3 billion last month, it said.
First Bank’s NPL rising: official
The non-performing loan ratio (NPL) at First Commercial Bank (第一銀行), a wholly owned banking unit of First Financial Holding Co (第一金控), is likely to rise to 1.8 percent by the end of the year, from 1.45 percent at the end of last year, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday, citing Annie Lee (李淑玲), deputy head of First Financial’s strategy and planning division.
For the whole of this year, First Bank’s total NPL could reach between NT$9 billion and NT$10 billion because of the economic downturn, Lee told Dow Jones.
IDC slashes prediction
Industry tracker IDC on Wednesday slashed its projection of global spending on information technology, saying it expected the figure to edge up 0.5 percent this year because of the economic downturn.
IDC backed off a November prediction that global spending would grow 2.6 percent this year and said that if exchange rate trends continued, US technology exporters would take financial beatings.
“The sharp economic downturn which began in 2007 is now affecting consumer and IT spending in a significant way,” IDC said in a press release.
IDC expects the semiconductor market to plunge 22 percent this year after sliding 2 percent last year. The “abrupt slowdown” in chip shipments is likely to affect Asia, Europe and the US, IDC said.
The worldwide semiconductor market will not recover until next year, it said.
Manufacturing sales shrink
The sales volume of the manufacturing sector shrank to NT$2.36 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, marking a year-on-year drop of 29.39 percent because of the worldwide economic downturn, statistics released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs on Wednesday showed.
In the fourth quarter, domestic sales fell 30.67 percent from the same period the previous year to NT$1.14 trillion, while export sales dropped 28.15 percent to NT$1.22 trillion.
The accumulated sales volume of the manufacturing sector fell to NT$12.06 trillion last year, down 2.46 percent year-on-year.
NT dollar closes lower
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against the greenback on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, sliding NT$0.103 to close at NT$34.850. Turnover was US$765 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