Housing prices are expected to rise between 20 percent and 30 percent over the next two to three years after the housing market bottomed out in the first quarter, an analyst with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) said yesterday.
The housing market is showing signs of recovery, UBS analyst Chung Chao-an (鍾朝安) said, with trade volume rising 47 percent quarter-on-quarter last quarter.
Housing resale prices saw 10 percent quarterly growth and 3 percent growth year-on-year, Chung said.
Despite a 1.6 percent quarterly drop in prices of new housing, between 70 percent and 80 percent of properties sold in the first quarter were resales, he said.
Judging from the increase in prices and trade volume, the market seems to have bottomed out in the first quarter, Chung said.
He predicted that the unemployment rate could reach a peak in the fourth quarter of this year or the first quarter of next year and that there would be room for house prices to rise further after that.
Over the next two to three years, an anticipated increase in trade with China and an overall recovery of the domestic economy and consumer confidence amid a low-interest rate environment should push realty prices higher, he said.
Meanwhile, Chung suggested that investors buy shares in Taiwan Fertilizer (台肥) and Far Eastern Textile (遠東紡織) because their portfolios contain assets with high potential for development.
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