TAIEX closes little changed
Taiwan’s benchmark stock index closed little changed yesterday as profit taking reversed gains from earlier in the day, when the index moved close to the 9,100 point level, dealers said.
The TAIEX closed down 2.88 points or 0.03 percent at 9,020.40, after moving between 9,014.36 and 9,082.01, on turnover of NT$104.57 billion (US$3.7 billion).
The market opened up 0.65 percent at the day’s high, led by select electronics heavyweights, but selling followed to erode the gains as market sentiment turned cautious ahead of technical resistance near the 9,100 mark, dealers said.
Tax revenues drop 6.9%
Tax revenues decreased 6.9 percent from a year earlier to NT$91.1 billion (US$3.18 billion) last month, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
“The account entry day of some commodity taxes and vehicle license taxes was delayed to this month, driving down the amount of tax revenues last month,” Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳), deputy director of the ministry’s statistics department, told a media briefing.
Revenue from the commodity tax totaled NT$10.9 billion last month, down 17.8 percent from the previous year, the ministry’s statement showed.
The government collected a total of NT$401 billion in tax revenues for the first four months of the year, which represented an increase of 2 percent from a year earlier and represented 100.2 percent of the government’s budget goal, according to ministry data.
For the first four months of the year, revenue from sales taxes surged 10.9 percent to NT$88.4 billion for the first four months, posting a record high for the period, data showed.
Hon Hai to sell notes
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, plans to raise NT$4.95 billion (US$174 million) in its third sale of New Taiwan dollar notes this year, a person familiar with the matter said.
Hon Hai expects to sell NT$1.45 billion of five-year, unsecured notes, NT$2.5 billion of seven-year bonds and NT$1 billion of 10-year securities, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public.
Hon Hai sold NT$7.05 billion in bonds in three tranches last month, with the five-year notes priced at 1.43 percent, it said on April 22.
Energy consumption rises
Taiwan’s energy consumption in March rose 3.1 percent from a year earlier, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ energy bureau said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Coal imports gained 18 percent to 5.48 million tonnes, while imports of liquefied natural gas increased 1.1 percent to 1.1 billion cubic meters, the bureau said.
Post office chooses partners
State-run Chunghwa Post Co (中華郵政) said yesterday that it has chosen post offices in Japan and China as its first overseas partners for Chunghwa’s online shopping business.
Chunghwa is still in talks with Japanese and Chinese post offices and it will take a while to finalize details on transaction settlements, security and refund policies for purchases, Chunghwa vice president Chen Tzu-de (陳賜得) said.
The cooperation will bring Chunghwa more business opportunities as local consumers can buy goods from Japan or China on Chunghwa’s online shopping Web site Post Mall, which was launched last year, Chen said.
Since October, 1,087 stores have signed a contract with Post Mall. So far, 824 stores have made their products available online, according to Chen.
The online shopping Web site attracts a monthly average of 5 million hits, with average monthly sales of NT$5 million.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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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
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