TAIEX falls on cautious trading
Share prices retreated yesterday after a rebound on Wednesday, as market sentiment turned cautious ahead of a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels to address the eurozone debt crisis, dealers said.
Many investors took to the sidelines, waiting for the outcome of another policy meeting of the European Central Bank later in the day, dealers said.
Turnover also shrank because of the uncertainty ahead of the presidential and legislative elections on Jan. 14, they said.
The TAIEX closed down 50.1 points, or 0.71 percent, at 6,982.90, after moving between 6,907.95 and 7,018.64 on turnover of NT$67.95 billion (US$2.25 billion).
Fubon fined over fraud
The Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday fined Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) NT$4 million for lax internal control related to a sports lottery fraud at its subsidiary, Taiwan Sport Lottery Corp (運彩科技), in September.
The nation’s second-largest financial service provider failed to exercise due internal oversight or keep the regulator posted promptly, the commission said in a statement.
The scam, in which an employee manipulated the computer betting system in August to his own benefit, raised a public outcry and top executives at the lottery firm resigned to take responsibility.
Fubon Financial said in a statement that it respected the commission’s ruling.
Housing transactions weak
The housing market is expected to post its lowest number of deals in eight years as the luxury tax and the European debt crisis hold back the market, a real-estate agency said yesterday.
Fewer than 360,000 property transactions are expected for this year — less than half that of 2008, when the last global financial crisis struck, Evertrust Rehouse Group (永慶房仲集團) said in a report.
The total number of buildings sold nationwide in the first 10 months of the year stood at 308,000, Ministry of the Interior statistics showed.
Evertrust head researcher Jeffery Huang (黃增福) said that home prices could drop next year as demand shrinks.
However, commercial property sales are predicted to continue to rise as the demand for downtown office buildings remains stable, he added.
UMC’s sales drop 22.8%
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 2 contract chipmaker, yesterday said that revenue last month fell 22.75 percent to NT$8.07 billion. That compares with NT$10.44 billion in the same month last year and NT$8.26 billion in the previous month, UMC said in a statement.
Wistron posts record sales
Wistron Corp (緯創), the nation’s No. 3 laptop contract maker, yesterday reported record-sales of NT$66.1 billion last month, up 5.2 percent from a month ago and 24.2 percent from a year ago, amid strong shipments of handheld devices.
Revenue from January to last month was NT$591.98 billion, up 5.6 percent year-on-year.
Meanwhile, bigger rival Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) saw its revenue last month shrink to NT$96.86 billion as a shortage of hard disk drives affected its laptop shipments. The figure was down 9.7 percent month-on-month and 3.4 percent year-on-year.
Total revenue from January to last month was NT$989.52 billion, inching down 0.6 percent from a year ago.
NT dollar edges down
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday fell NT$0.011 to close at NT$30.179 against the US dollar. Turnover was US$752 million.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts