Shares fall on Japan fears
Share prices closed down 1.28 percent yesterday after heavy selling triggered by the resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and concern that the political situation in the world’s second-largest economy will impact the global recovery, dealers said.
The TAIEX closed down 93.62 at 7,195.71 after fluctuating between 7,159.75 and 7,304.13 on turnover of NT$79.69 billion (US$2.46 billion). A total of 2,148 stocks closed down and 665 were up, with 259 remaining unchanged.
“Hatoyama’s resignation has added uncertainty to the global economy. With fingers crossed, investors were wondering how big the impact will be,” Mega Securities (兆豐證券) analyst Alex Huang (黃國偉) said. “Such uncertainty is the last thing investors wanted.”
AMD unveils Fusion chips
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), the second-biggest computer-processor maker, will unveil the first working versions of its Fusion line of chips in a bid to offer graphics features that rival Intel Corp can’t easily match.
The Fusion lineup, which combines a microprocessor and a graphics processor in one piece of silicon, will appear in personal computers early next year, said Rick Bergman, a senior vice president at Sunnyvale, California-based AMD.
His team will give demonstrations of computers using Fusion to handle faster Web browsing and run games from Microsoft Corp at the Computex show in Taiwan.
Samples of the chips have already been given to computer manufacturers, Bergman said.
TPK Holding to list on TAIEX
TPK Holding Co (宸鴻科技), a China-based touch-panel technology application provider, is expected to launch a primary listing on the Taiwanese bourse in the fourth quarter of this year, its underwriter said on Tuesday.
TPK is expected to be the second foreign company to launch a primary listing in Taiwan after Integrated Memory Logic Ltd, a US-based IC circuit designer, made its debut in the middle of last month.
Underwriter Yuanta Securities Corp (元大證券) said TPK’s listing application has passed a preliminary review by a screening panel at the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp.
According to TPK’s prospectus, the company, which was founded in 2005 and is currently capitalized at NT$1.8 billion (US$56.26 million), is planning to issue 28 million new shares at NT$188 each in the listing to raise funds for future operations.
Bad-loan ratios fell in April
The bad-loan ratios for the nation’s credit and cash card issuers both declined in April, the figures released by the Financial Supervisory Commission showed on Tuesday.
Thirty-seven credit-card issuers averaged a 0.74 percent bad-loan ratio as of the end of April, down 0.10 percentage points month-on-month, the data showed.
The sector’s balance of revolving credit totaled NT$192.9 billion (US$5.96 billion) in April, down from NT$195.4 billion the previous month, statistics showed.
No credit-card issuers had a bad-loan ratio above 3 percent, the commission’s figures show.
Eighteen cash-card issuers averaged a 2.179 percent bad-loan ratio, which represented a drop of 0.013 percentage points from the previous month.
No cash-card issuer had a bad-loan ratio above 3 percent except for Union Bank of Taiwan (聯邦銀行), which had the highest bad-loan ratio at 27.570 percent and has stopped issuing new cards, the commission said.
NT gains against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar gained ground against the US dollar yesterday, rising NT$0.103 to close at NT$32.315. Turnover was US$782 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