The nation’s foreign exchange reserves totaled US$387.97 billion last month, down US$5.36 billion from a month earlier and the lowest since January, the central bank said yesterday.
“The main factor leading to the drop in foreign exchange reserves last month was the net outflow of foreign capital that created demand for foreign exchange,” the bank’s Department of Foreign Exchange director-general Lin Sun-yuan (林孫源) told a press briefing.
Net outflow of foreign capital totaled US$1.94 billion last month, Lin said, citing data from the Financial Supervisory Commission.
As a result, the market value of securities and deposits held by foreign investors at the end of last month reached US$180.8 billion, equivalent to 47 percent of the nation’s foreign exchange reserves, the lowest level this year, the bank’s data showed.
Moreover, with the euro and other major currencies depreciating in value against the greenback last month, foreign exchange reserves denominated in those currencies were worth less in terms of the base currency — the US dollar — Lin added.
The data showed Taiwan continues to have with the world’s fourth-largest foreign exchange reserves, behind China, Japan and Russia.
China’s foreign exchange reserves grew to US$3.202 trillion at the end of September, while Japan’s stood at US$1.129 trillion in October and Russia’s at US$464 billion.
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