TAIEX rises 1.32 percent
Taiwanese shares closed up 1.32 percent yesterday, tracking gains on Wall Street and regional markets, dealers said.
The TAIEX index rose 98.07 points to 7,536.05 on turnover of NT$146.02 billion (US$4.57 billion).
Gainers led losers by 1,783 to 748 with 238 stocks unchanged.
The market rose on gains in Wall Street and Asian bourses as well as a stronger local currency against the US dollar, Capital Securities trader Diana Wu said.
“Some are concerned about the impact of the rising Taiwan dollar on technology companies, but other currencies ... are also rising, so it may not necessarily hurt Taiwan’s competitiveness,” she said.
CPC may use various currencies
State-run CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said it was studying whether to use a basket of currencies to pay for crude oil purchases.
“Our finance department is studying where to use a variety of currencies, including the yen, the euro and the dollar, for crude oil trade, compared with only the dollar now,” CPC vice president Lin Maw-wen (林茂文) said in a telephone interview yesterday. “Our purchases are relatively small, so we’ll just follow the trend.”
Criticism of the US dollar’s role as the world’s main reserve currency has grown in the wake of the global financial crisis. Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), CPC’s smaller rival, has been using euros and yen to pay for crude oil purchases from Iran, Lin Keh-yen (林克彥), a spokesman for the Taiwanese refiner, said by telephone.
THSRC holiday volume rises
Taiwan High Speed Rail Co (THSRC, 台灣高鐵) said in a statement yesterday that passenger volume rose 20 percent during the Mid-Autumn Festival between last Friday and Monday from last year.
THSRC added 29 trains over the holiday period to carry an extra 71,000 passengers, the statement said, adding that all trains arrived at their destinations on time.
Passengers totaled more than 430,000 during the four days with 539 trains in service, the statement said, putting the load factor at 53.05 percent, up 5.5 percentage points from last year.
The company encouraged passengers to make reservations, saying doing so online can get a 5 percent discount.
WiMAX trial run in Hsinchu
Local WiMAX license holder Global Mobile Corp (全球一動) introduced on Monday its first WiMAX trial-run service in Hsinchu, with an official commercial launch in January at the latest.
The company said 70 percent of the base station’s deployment was completed.
At present, it covers more than 70 percent of the population there and it aims to extend the coverage to 95 percent before the commercial rollout.
The company said it will launch more exciting applications to attract subscribers, in addition to the main selling point of fast Internet connection.
Companies such as Vmax Telecom Co (威邁思), Vee Telecom Multimedia Co (威達超舜) and Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信), the nation’s No. 3 mobile carrier, are also expected to launch WiMAX services by the end of the year or early next year.
NT dollar gains on greenback
The NT dollar gained ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, rising NT$0.075 to close at NT$32.180.
A total of US$1.39 billion changed hands during the day’s trading.
MARKET LEADERSHIP: Investors are flocking to Nvidia, drawn by the company’s long-term fundamntals, dominant position in the AI sector, and pricing and margin power Two years after Nvidia Corp made history by becoming the first chipmaker to achieve a US$1 trillion market capitalization, an even more remarkable milestone is within its grasp: becoming the first company to reach US$4 trillion. After the emergence of China’s DeepSeek (深度求索) sent the stock plunging earlier this year and stoked concerns that outlays on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure were set to slow, Nvidia shares have rallied back to a record. The company’s biggest customers remain full steam ahead on spending, much of which is flowing to its computing systems. Microsoft Corp, Meta Platforms Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc are
Luxury fashion powerhouse Prada SpA has acknowledged the ancient Indian roots of its new sandal design after the debut of the open-toe footwear sparked a furor among Indian artisans and politicians thousands of miles from the catwalk in Italy. Images from Prada’s fashion show in Milan last weekend showed models wearing leather sandals with a braided design that resembled handmade Kolhapuri slippers with designs dating back to the 12th century. A wave of criticism in the media and from lawmakers followed over the Italian brand’s lack of public acknowledgement of the Indian sandal design, which is named after a city in the
The US overtaking China as Taiwan’s top export destination could boost industrial development and wage growth, given the US is a high-income economy, an economist said yesterday. However, Taiwan still needs to diversify its export markets due to the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s administration, said Chiou Jiunn-rong (邱俊榮), an economics professor at National Central University. Taiwan’s exports soared to a record US$51.74 billion last month, driven by strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products and continued orders, with information and communication technology (ICT) and audio/video products leading all sectors. The US reclaimed its position as Taiwan’s top export market, accounting for
NEW MODELS: AI researchers are facing challenges in managing deceptive behaviors, with limited regulation and testing, as the race for advanced models intensifies The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors — lying, scheming and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals. In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic PBC’s latest creation, Claude 4, lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatening to reveal an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed. These episodes highlight a sobering reality: More than two years after ChatGPT shook the world, AI researchers still do not fully understand how their own creations work. Yet the race to