House price sales increase
The decline in Taipei’s existing-home prices over the past year led to an increase in the number of units sold last month, a real estate broker said.
The transaction volume of residential units increased as much as 50 percent last month from February in Taipei, said Stanley Su (蘇啟榮), senior researcher at Sinyi Realty Co (信義房屋), Taiwan’s biggest property broker. Prices have fallen 15 percent since last April, he said.
“A correction in prices lured buyers back to the market,” Su said by telephone yesterday. “Some people have delayed purchases from last year.”
“Panic sentiment from the global financial tsunami has eased,” Su said.
Far Eastern sues Xia Yi
Far Eastern Transport Corp (遠東航空) filed criminal and civil suits against Xia Yi (夏怡), wife of former chairman Stephen Tsuei (崔湧), and seeks compensation from Xia, the Taipei-based airline said in an exchange statement yesterday.
Tsuei was indicted in August last year by Taiwan prosecutors on charges of alleged embezzlement, forgery and breach of trust that led to the collapse of the insolvent airline. He faces an 18-year jail term.
Cathay Financial reports income
Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), Taiwan’s largest listed financial-services company, reported preliminary first-quarter net income of NT$4.98 billion (US$147.5 million), or NT$0.5 per share, the company said in an exchange filing yesterday.
The company had a loss of NT$5.98 billion, or a loss of NT$0.65 per share, a year earlier.
Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控), Taiwan’s third-largest listed financial services company, Thursday posted first-quarter profit of NT$3.91 billion, or NT$0.35 per share, the company said in another exchange filing, without providing comparative figures.
Meanwhile, Taishin Financial Holding Co’s (台新金控) net profit in the first quarter totaled NT$830 million, or NT$0.08 a share, the company said.
Compal shipments beat forecast
Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), the world’s second-largest maker of notebook computers, posted first-quarter shipments that beat its own forecast.
Compal, which supplies laptops to companies including Hewlett-Packard Co, shipped 6.35 million notebooks in the three months to March 31, surpassing its own Feb. 25 estimate for 5.8 million to 6.2 million units, company spokesman Chang Chih-ming (張志銘) said in an e-mail yesterday.
Compal maintains its earlier forecast for 15 percent shipment growth this quarter from the prior three-month period, Chang said.
Unpaid workers get tax benefit
The Ministry of Finance said in a statement on Wednesday that the government would extend the tax payment deadline for workers who took unpaid leave.
The extension applies to workers taking unpaid leave in any two months from September last year to the end of this year, the ministry said.
Trend Micro unveils application
Trend Micro Inc (趨勢科技) yesterday introduced a free Smart Surfing application on Apple Inc’s iTunes application store for iPhone and iPod touch users.
The anti-virus company marked its foray into mobile computing by releasing a secure browser application that protects Internet users from malicious Web sites and prevents them from having their personal information stolen.
Trend Micro said its Smart Protection Network infrastructure used the cloud computing concept to process 5 billion uniform resource locators (URL) daily in order to provide the most up-to-the-minute Internet browsing protection.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts