Tariff cuts to be extended
The government plans to extend tariff cuts on wheat, wheat flour, milk powder and four other products by six months from today to Feb. 9 next year to help stabilize rising prices, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on its Web site yesterday.
The move comes as the nation continues to fight rising inflationary pressure owing to higher food import prices.
The government initially lowered tariffs on wheat and wheat flour by 50 percent and those on milk powder by 25 percent on Feb. 10 for six months.
TSMC board approves bond sale
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chip maker, said yesterday its board had approved a proposal to sell as much as NT$35 billion (US$1.2 billion) in unsecured corporate bonds domestically to obtain long-term, low fixed-cost funding, according to a company statement.
TSMC didn’t give a timing and pricing for the bond sale.
HTC, China Unionpay team up
HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s No. 5 smartphone brand, yesterday said it was teaming up with China Unionpay (中國銀聯) to tap into China’s growing mobile payment market.
The first product of the partnership is a soon-to-be-launched HTC smartphone that incorporates Unionpay features, allowing consumers access to its mobile banking and mobile payment services.
HTC is tapping China’s mobile payment sector via its strategic partner Shanghai F-road Commercial Services Co (上海方付通商務服務), a mobile application developer that provides tailor-made apps for financial institutions to offer mobile financial services on smartphones.
Taiwan short of Toyotas
Taiwan is short of imports of some 2,000 finished Toyota vehicles as a result of the automaker’s stunted production lines from a power rationing policy in Japan.
The company’s assembly plants in Japan have so far regained 90 percent of their production capacity in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Toyota’s local dealer, Hotai Motor (和泰汽車), said yesterday.
However, due to Japan’s power rationing plan, Toyota’s plants cannot recover their full output until October, after which Taiwan’s shortage of some popular Toyota models is expected to be relieved.
According to Hotai, Taiwan is currently short of models, such as the Lexus CT200 and Toyota’s Prius, Previa and RAV4.
Formosa Plastics expects gains
Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑) may gain NT$109 million from selling real estate in Greater Kaohsiung for NT$647 million yesterday, the company said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
Cut stock fall limits: lawmaker
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) yesterday urged President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to halve the 7 percent maximum allowable fall in share prices to help stabilize the stock market.
The stock exchange cut the maximum allowable daily fall to combat market slumps in late 2000, September 2001 and October 2008.
Presidential Office S pokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) said Ma was paying close attention to the global situation and had asked the Executive Yuan to adopt necessary measures to help stabilize the market.
NT dollar retreats
The New Taiwan dollar slid NT$0.025 to close at NT$29.050 against the US dollar yesterday.
Turnover totaled US$1.631 billion, compared with US$1.323 billion on Monday.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
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