Despite the recovering global economy, Taiwan’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are less bullish than their counterparts in Asia with their business confidence remaining at the lowest level in the region, an HSBC survey showed.
The semi-annual survey, which polled 6,031 businesses from 20 markets in December, said all Asian markets showed increased confidence levels except for Taiwan, which dropped one point.
CONFIDENCE
Taiwanese SMEs’ confidence index in terms of economic outlook stood at 97 in the fourth quarter of last year, far below the average level of 112 in Asia, the survey showed, adding that a level of more than 100 showed optimism.
“This is because most of the Taiwanese SMEs focus on European and US markets,” Russell Liu (劉政瑩), senior vice president and head of CMB Business Banking at HSBC, told the Taipei Times yesterday.
With these two Western markets failing to see a strong rebound from the financial crunch, Taiwanese SMEs tend to feel less upbeat when compared with their Asian peers, Liu said.
“Business confidence among SMEs across Asia has already exceeded pre-September 2008 financial crisis levels,” he said.
UNSTABLE
More than 40 percent of polled Taiwanese SMEs said unstable financial conditions such as credit, exchange rates and interest rates remained the biggest obstacle to their international business, the survey said.
Liu also said that because of cultural familiarity, low costs and relaxed cross-strait policies, up to 30 percent of Taiwanese SMEs planned to engage in trade with China in the following two years.
Twenty-one percent said they would trade with Southeast Asia and 14 percent said they would trade with North America.
The survey said nearly 60 percent of Taiwanese SMEs were most concerned about possible hikes in raw material prices in the next six months, while 48 percent worried about the US and global economic prospects, followed by 39 percent that worried about fluctuations of the local currency.
In addition, up to 87 percent of surveyed SMEs in Taiwan said they would maintain current employment levels, with only 9 percent planning to increase staff, the survey said, adding that less than 50 percent would increase their capital spending.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS