TAIEX gains on auto stocks
The TAIEX ended higher yesterday on gains in construction and automobile stocks, as well as a strong Wall Street rebound last week, dealers said.
The index rose 34.90 points, or 0.40 percent, to end the day at 8,774.72 after moving between 8,772.33 and 8,808.47 on turnover of NT$107.054 billion (US$3.74 billion).
Construction stocks posted the biggest gains of the day, ending up 2.8 percent, while textiles had the biggest losses of the day, ending down 1.1 percent.
Central bank plans CD auction
The central bank will auction NT$100 billion of 364-day certificates of deposit (CD) tomorrow, the bank said in a statement on its Web site yesterday.
Fubon’s China venture approved
Fubon Asset Management Co (富邦投信) received approval from China Securities Regulatory Commission to form a fund management venture with China’s Founder Securities Co (方正證券), parent Financial Holding Holding Co (富邦金控) said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
The venture, Founder Fubon Fund Management Co (方正富邦基金管理公司), will be based in Beijing and have initial capital of 200 million yuan (US$30.9 million), Fubon Financial said last year.
Canon to build new factory
Canon Inc will build a new local factory and expand an existing one to make more cameras with interchangeable lenses, the fastest growing segment of digital-imaging devices.
Canon, the world’s biggest camera maker, will spend about ¥10 billion (US$124 million) on the expansion, Takafumi Hongo, a company spokesman, said in a telephone interview.
Canon forecasts sales of about 7 million single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras this year, compared with 5.9 million last year, he said.
Shipments of SLR cameras jumped 30 percent last year, more than double the 13 percent gain by compact models, according to the Camera & Imaging Products Association, a Tokyo-based industry group. Canon had the biggest share of the market, with 44.5 percent, research company IDC said in April.
The Nikkei Shimbun reported on Canon’s plan to build the Taiwanese factory earlier yesterday.
External storage market booms
Revenue of the nation’s external storage market grew 40.3 percent year-on-year to US$32.55 million in the first quarter of the year because of emerging demand for cloud computing systems and applications, market tracker International Data Corp (IDC) said yesterday.
Shipments in external storage market also reached 15,925 terabytes during the period, an increase of 66.2 percent from a year earlier, IDC said.
“The surging growth was driven mainly by the enhancement and expansion of existing systems in cloud computing, manufacturing and financial sectors, as well as the establishment of new systems for applications and services of telecom carriers and media operators,” Leon Kao (高振偉), a market analyst with IDC, said in a statement.
In the first three months of this year, the country’s top four external storage providers by revenue were IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co, NetApp Inc and EMC Corp, with a combined total of more than 70 percent market share.
Mid-range products retained the biggest share of the Taiwanese market with 41 percent, followed by entry-level products with 30 percent and high-tier products with 29 percent, IDC said.
NT dollar up against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar rose against the US currency yesterday, adding NT$0.028 to close at NT$28.752. Turnover totaled US$586 million during the trading session.
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Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by