TAIEX closes above 7,500
The TAIEX made further gains yesterday to end the day above the 7,500-point mark as more investors returned to the trading floor to rebuild their portfolios after the Lunar New Year holiday, dealers said.
Interest rotated to the financial sector, which had lagged behind the bellwether electronics sector, while suppliers for Apple Inc continued to attract buying on high hopes that the US consumer electronics giant would record higher profits after its better-than--expected results during the October-to-December period, they said.
The weighted index closed up 1.48 percent to end at 7,517.08 on turnover of NT$160.54 billion (US$5.43 billion).
Powerchip NT$22bn in the red
Local memory chipmaker Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) yesterday posted losses of NT$22.13 billion for last year after fourth-quarter losses reached NT$8.87 billion because of plummeting prices for PC DRAM chips.
The loss reversed the firm’s NT$3.91 billion net profit in 2010.
PC DRAM chipmaker Rexchip Electronics Corp (瑞晶電子), which is 30 percenet owned by Powerchip, yesterday reported losses of NT$6.25 billion for last year, according to a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Japan’s Elpida Memory Inc holds a 63 percent stake in Rexchip.
Cross-strait trade offices near
Taiwan and China will set up reciprocal trade offices in the first quarter of this year, Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said yesterday.
The two sides are moving toward finalizing the arrangements and the semi-official Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) will most likely be the first Taiwanese agency to get off the mark, setting up offices in six Chinese cities, Shih said.
“The establishment of formal offices on both sides will facilitate the promotion of bilateral trade and economic cooperation,” Shih said at a luncheon for about 250 China-based Taiwan businesspeople, who returned home for the Lunar New Year holidays.
Shih did not name the six cities that TAITRA is targeting, but the council said recently that Beijing and Shanghai would be among its top choices, while Wuhan and Chengdu were also being considered.
Two-year bonds on offer today
The government will offer NT$30 billion in two-year bonds at 0.8 percent today, according to the median estimate of fixed-income traders in a Bloomberg News survey.
The highest forecast was 0.8 percent and the lowest 0.75 percent, the poll of six finance companies showed. Similar-maturity notes yielded 0.808 percent in the secondary market yesterday, according to GRETAI Securities Market.
Investors will bid on the yield at the auction. The issuer will set the security’s coupon by taking the highest winning yield.
NT dollar up against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar rose against the US dollar yesterday, up NT$0.166 to close at NT$29.620 on inflows of foreign funds as institutional investors continued to rebuild their portfolios after the Lunar New Year holiday, dealers said.
The NT dollar gained strength immediately after the foreign exchange market opened as foreign investors quickly sought to move funds into the stock exchange in search of bargains, dealers said.
A rising euro also encouraged traders to raise their NT holdings and dump the greenback, after hopes grew that Greece would reach an agreement with creditors to rescue the country from a financial crisis, dealers said.
Turnover totaled US$1.44 billion.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to