The nation’s recovering economy and a large increase in the number of Chinese tourists could boost profitability for Taiwan-based real-estate investment trusts (REIT), Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評) said in a statement released yesterday.
The local arm of Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services expects the performance of the REITs to improve over the next two quarters — especially for those with retail and hotel properties — on the back of growing business activity and tourism volume, the statement said.
“We expect most of these -REITs to generate stronger cash flows in the next two quarters while maintaining conservative debt usage,” Taiwan Ratings credit analyst Shirly Kuo (郭映彤) said in the statement.
The occupancy rates of office properties in most REITs rated by the firm showed improvement or remained high in the first quarter, while retail properties reported stronger sales growth, Taiwan Ratings said.
Kuo attributed the pickup in occupancy to an earlier round of rental discounts, giving the trusts strong bargaining power to raise rental rates for new and renewed contracts as demand for office space recovers.
The vacancy rate for office space declined slightly to 11 percent in the first quarter, from 11.56 percent three months earlier, and it is likely to drop further over the next two quarters, the ratings agency said.
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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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
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