Shares up on US rebound
Shares closed up 0.72 percent yesterday on buying triggered by a strong overnight rebound on Wall Street that pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the key 10,000-point level again, dealers said.
The TAIEX closed up 52.16 points at 7,295.32, after moving between 7,271.30 and 7,364.01, on turnover of NT$101.71 billion (US$3.17 billion).
The market opened up 1.32 percent as investors took their cues from the Wall Street gains, but profit-taking emerged during the trading session that compromised the earlier gains, with the index approaching the nearest technical resistance at around 7,400 points, the dealers said.
“Investor sentiment has improved since the recovery in the last three sessions. It seems that the market has managed to regain some stability after the recent heavy losses,” TLG Asset Management (台壽保投信) analyst Arch Shih (施博元) said.
“The profit-taking seen during the trading session was just a technical reaction and a trend toward further rebounds remains in place,” he said.
Taipower bonds sell well
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), the nation’s biggest electricity producer, increased the amount of bonds sold in an auction by almost 50 percent after demand exceeded the debt on offer.
The state-run utility sold NT$14.95 billion of bonds in three tranches, compared with a planned NT$10 billion, Clint Chou (周義岳), a company spokesman, said by phone yesterday. The auction attracted total bids of NT$35.65 billion, according to an e-mailed statement.
Proceeds will be used to help fund investment in power stations, Taipower said.
The company plans to spend NT$160 billion on upgrades and the construction of power plants and transmission lines this year, Chou said in March.
The utility has a twAAA debt rating, the highest from Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評), a Standard & Poor’s venture.
The company sold NT$4.5 billion of five-year notes, NT$4.45 billion of seven-year bonds and NT$6 billion of 10-year securities, Taipower added.
The five-year notes priced yesterday will pay an annual interest of 1.39 percent, the seven-year bonds 1.65 percent and the 10-year securities 1.79 percent, the company said.
Fortune Securities set for IPO
Taipei-based Fortune Securities Corp (富鑫證券), which has operated securities investment and services in Vietnam for the past three years, has recently been approved to become a publicly listed company there, a business source said on Thursday.
Fortune Securities is scheduled to be listed on the Hanoi Stock Exchange early next month, making it the 10th securities house in Vietnam to become publicly listed and the first Taiwan-invested securities company in Vietnam to become listed, according to CX Technology Corp (錩新科技).
CX Technology, the world’s largest producer of magnetic conductive components and parts for loudspeakers, is a major shareholder of Fortune Securities.
According to CX Technology, there are 104 securities firms in Vietnam, serving roughly 1 million clients nationwide.
NT dollar erases gains
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday erased earlier gains in the final minutes of trading as the central bank bought dollars to damp this week’s appreciation, said traders who declined to be identified.
The local currency rose as much as 0.7 percent to trade at NT$31.948 against its US counterpart, before closing at NT$32.175 on turnover of US$867 million.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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