Formosa Plastics plans plant
Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), one of Taiwan’s largest industrial conglomerates, said yesterday it plans a stainless steel plant in Vietnam, with local media citing a budget of over US$3 billion.
The plant will be part of a steel mill complex that the conglomerate intends to build in the central province of Ha Tinh, a group official said.
The official said a timetable of the construction of the stainless steel plant had not been finalized, and declined to disclose further details.
The Taipei-based Economic Daily News reported yesterday the plant will cost the group NT$100 billion (US$3.1 billion).
The newspaper said the planned stainless steel plant is expected to roll out 2 million tonnes a year.
HK firms hit by big tax bills
Taiwan’s tax authorities have ordered four Hong Kong clothes brands to pay millions of US dollars in fines for alleged tax evasion, officials said yesterday.
The National Tax Bureau has fined HangTen, Giordano, Bossini and BaLeNo around NT$530 million (US$17 million) collectively for alleged tax evasion over a four-year period ending in 2002.
HangTen was fined NT$293 million alone.
The four firms, which have hundreds of stores in Taiwan, rejected the charges and previously sought to present their case in the court system, but they lost the legal battle, a HangTen official said.
HTC phone scoops prize
HTC Hero smartphone was announced last week as the best mobile handset of the year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, beating Samsung Star, Samsung Omnia HD, Nokia N97 mini and BlackBerry Bold 9700, the company said.
That was the first time that HTC Corp (宏達電), the leading maker of smartphones running on both Android and Windows Mobile platforms, made it into the shortlist for the category.
HTC Hero is a 3.2-inch touch screen model that runs on the Android operating system.
TSMC purchases equipment
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), the world’s largest custom-chip maker, bought NT$696 million (US$21.6 million) of equipment from Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co, the Hsinchu-based company said in an exchange filing yesterday.
Meanwhile, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (日月光半導體), the world’s largest chip packaging and testing company, said in an exchange filing it bought NT$1.08 billion of equipment from Kulicke and Soffa Global Holding Corp.
“The purchase shows that they have a lot of orders for the rest of the year and investors are optimistic about this company,” said Rubens Lai, a trader at Taiwan International Securities Corp (金鼎證券).
S Korea set for record offerings
South Korea will “easily” absorb initial share offerings that will probably surge to a record this year amid abundant liquidity and optimism shares will hold their value, Daewoo Securities Co said.
Companies may raise as much as 12 trillion won (US$10.4 billion) from initial public offerings this year, said Gabriel Jung, 47, head of the investment banking group at Daewoo Securities, the No. 1 IPO underwriter in South Korea over the past five years. That would be more than threefold the 3.4 trillion won raised last year.
“There’s ample liquidity, confidence in the stock market has recovered quickly from the global credit crunch and there are signals for positive corporate earnings,” Jung said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, surpassing the US$600 billion mark for the first time, the central bank said yesterday. Last month, the country’s foreign exchange reserves rose US$5.51 billion from a month earlier to reach US$602.94 billion due to an increase in returns from the central bank’s portfolio management, the movement of other foreign currencies in the portfolio against the US dollar and the bank’s efforts to smooth the volatility of the New Taiwan dollar. Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民)said a rate cut cycle launched by the US Federal Reserve
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Pegatron Corp (和碩), a key assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, on Thursday reported a 12.3 percent year-on-year decline in revenue for last quarter to NT$257.86 billion (US$8.44 billion), but it expects revenue to improve in the second half on traditional holiday demand. The fourth quarter is usually the peak season for its communications products, a company official said on condition of anonymity. As Apple released its new iPhone 17 series early last month, sales in the communications segment rose sequentially last month, the official said. Shipments to Apple have been stable and in line with earlier expectations, they said. Pegatron shipped 2.4 million notebook
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
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