TAIEX falls on profit-taking
The TAIEX closed down 0.31 percent yesterday as investors pocketed profits from the gains posted by the financial sector in the previous session, dealers said.
The index fell 28.11 points to 8,997.19, after moving between 8,988.58 and 9,046.18, on turnover of NT$161.35 billion (US$5.53 billion).
The market opened up 0.22 percent and moved to the day’s high on follow-through buying, but profit-taking followed as investors dumped financial shares, which had risen on optimism over banks’ profitability in anticipation of continued interest rate increases, dealers said.
A total of 2,441 stocks closed up, 1,986 finished down and 356 remained unchanged.
Tsann Kuen posts strong sales
Shares of Tsann Kuen Enterprise Co (燦坤實業), a computer, communications and consumer electronics product retailer, rallied yesterday after the company reported double-digit growth in sales last month, dealers said.
Tsann Kuen rose 2.84 percent to close at NT$61.50, with 4.29 million shares changing hands.
Earlier in the day, Tsann Kuen reported that sales last month reached NT$2.38 billion, up 20.54 percent from a year earlier. For the whole of last year, Tsann Kuen recorded NT$27.82 billion in sales, up 2.97 percent from 2009.
HK listings may top US$45bn
Initial public offerings in Hong Kong may raise as much as HK$350 billion (US$45 billion) this year, according to an estimate by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
The city may have 110 listings, the accounting firm said yesterday.
Initial offerings in Hong Kong raised a record HK$425.5 billion last year, according to Bloomberg data that include stock sold through the exercise of overallotment shares.
TSMC purchasing equipment
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, bought NT$4.3 billion in equipment from five vendors, the company said in five separate filings to the stock exchange yesterday.
The Hsinchu-based company purchased NT$1.28 billion of equipment from Tokyo Electron Ltd, NT$743 million from Hitachi High-Technologies Corp, NT$740 million from Applied Materials South East Asia Pacific Ltd, NT$557 million from Hermes Microvision Inc and NT$938 million from Taiwan’s China Steel Structure Co (中國鋼鐵結構), the statements said.
Highwealth profit up 62 percent
Highwealth Construction Corp (興富發建設), which on Monday bought a 1,051.57-ping (3,470m2) plot of land for NT$5.22 billion in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), said yesterday its profit last year jumped 61.6 percent from a year ago.
The Taipei-based land developer said in a stock exchange filing that pre-tax profit reached NT$7.09 billion last year on a revenue of NT$27.52 billion.
The company had NT$4.39 billion in pre-tax profit and NT$18.86 billion in revenue in 2009, according to its previous filing.
With 706.87 million of its shares outstanding, pre-tax earnings per share was NT$10.50 last year, the filing said.
NT ends little changed
The New Taiwan dollar approached a 13-year high before retreating to end little changed on suspected intervention by the central bank.
The NT dollar closed at NT$30.201 against the greenback, Taipei Forex Inc said. It was trading 3.6 percent stronger a minute before the end of the trading session.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the