China ties boost TAIEX
Taiwanese share prices closed 1.35 percent higher yesterday as the market continued to rally on optimism over warming economic links with China, dealers said.
The TAIEX rose 88.56 points to 6,667.53 on turnover of NT$138.32 billion (US$4.21 billion).
Gainers outnumbered losers 1,831 to 514, while 115 shares remained unchanged.
The market opened high and stayed strong throughout the session.
“The market continued the rebound from yesterday,” Alex Huang (黃國偉) of Mega International Investment Services (兆豐國際投顧) said.
Huang said he expected the market to meet resistance at the 6,700-point level, with trading short of what he said is a sufficient level.
Fertilizer venture extended
Taiwan Fertilizer Co (台肥), the nation’s biggest fertilizer producer, and Saudi Basic Industries Corp has agreed to extend their partnership in a venture by up to 20 years beyond Feb. 8, 2013, the Taiwanese company said in a stock exchange filing yesterday.
The extension on the venture, Al Jubail Fertilizer Co, now depends on Saudi regulatory approval, Taiwan Fertilizer said in the filing.
The two companies each hold 50 percent in the venture, which uses natural gas to produce 400,000 tonnes of ammonia and 600,000 tonnes of urea annually.
Chinese airline to open office
China Southern Airlines Co (南方航空) has become the first Chinese company to submit an application for approval to open a local subsidiary office in Taiwan after the government began accepting Chinese investments on Wednesday.
But Investment Commission Executive Secretary Fan Lang-dong (范良棟) said yesterday that the Chinese carrier needed to fill out more supporting documents to complete the application.
Insurance covers investment
Because investors’ risk aversion has yet to recover in the face of recent market fluctuations, Cardif Assurance Vie’s Taiwan branch on Wednesday launched its revised investment-linked insurance policy to appeal to investors.
Cardif Assurance Vie is an insurance arm of BNP Paribas, the top financial service provider in France.
The revised policy features a back-end load that allows investors to maximize their gain and pay sales charges later, said Ben Ng (黃旗興), general manager of the life insurer.
It also demands less account maintenance fees and contract annulment costs, while offering a wider array of 300 funds, including exchange-traded funds, Ng said.
Air competition surging
Competition is surging on the commercial air route between Taipei and Kuala Lumpur, with four airlines are now jostling for bigger shares of the market, industry sources said yesterday.
Malaysia Airlines announced that starting yesterday, it would increase its Taipei-Kuala Lumpur flights from three to five per week, while Air Asia, a Malaysia-based budget carrier, has also scheduled five weekly flights between the two cities starting on Wednesday.
With four carriers now operating on the route, travelers between the two cities have a choice of 22 flights per week.
Local currency falters
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, declining NT$0.162 to close at NT$32.947.
A total of US$959 million changed hands during the day’s trading.
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