Shares up 2 percent
Taiwanese shares closed up 2 percent yesterday on a Wall Street rally overnight and brightening prospects for investment ties with China, dealers said.
The TAIEX index rose 145.37 points to 7,429.98 on turnover of NT$101.75 billion (US$3.14 billion). Gainers outnumbered losers 1,697 to 745, while 191 shares remained unchanged.
The market was boosted by big caps focusing on flat panels and semiconductors after Taipei said it could ease controls on high-tech investments in China by local companies while allowing further Chinese investments in Taiwan.
“The remarks certainly boosted investor confidence,” Capital Securities (群益證券) analyst Chen Yu-yu (陳育娛) said. The market, however, could cap at 7,500, Chen said.
PRC-bound exports recovering
The Bureau of Foreign Trade said Taiwan’s China-bound exports would recover next month and the rest of the year. Export orders from China started to return to positive territory in July, bureau director-general Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬) told a media briefing.
Huang said the ministry intends to spend 25 percent of the annual trade promotion fund, from the current 15 percent, on sponsoring trade shows and other activities to help raise name recognition of Taiwan makers in China.
Huang said the promotion campaigns will target second-tier cities like Nanjing and Wuhan. The image improvement program can also help boost competitiveness of domestic products after Taiwan and China sign an economic cooperation framework agreement, he said.
AUO sells UMC shares
AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), Taiwan’s largest maker of liquid-crystal displays, sold 22 million shares of United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s second-largest custom-chip maker, for NT$346 million, the Hsinchu-based company said in an exchange filing yesterday.
AU Optronics sold the shares at an average price of NT$15.72 and made a profit of NT$113.8 million, the statement said.
Fubon cancels capital plan
Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) will cancel a capital enhancement plan because of changes in market conditions and the company’s finance plans, the company said in a stock exchange filing yesterday.
Last month, Fubon announced it would issue Global Depositary Receipts to increase its working capital and strengthen its finances. The company had planned to raise up to US$900 million through the issuance of new shares.
ChiNext firms attract huge bids
Ten companies scheduled to list on the ChiNext, China’s soon-to-be-launched NASDAQ-style board, said yesterday they attracted a combined 784.1 billion yuan (US$115 billion) in bids for subscriptions.
Demand for the initial public offerings’ retail tranche was high with shares in the firms, which range from software to medical equipment makers, oversubscribed by 82 to 258 times, filings to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange said.
The institutional tranche of the initial public offerings (IPO) the firms were oversubscribed by 35 to 117 times, the statements said.
The companies, which took subscriptions from retail and institutional investors on Friday, will raise a total of 6.68 billion yuan from the IPOs — more than double the 3.16 billion initially sought.
NT dollar gains on greenback
The NT dollar gained ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, rising NT$0.099 to close at NT$32.376.
A total of US$844 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],”
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