Although the nation’s leading indicators rebounded for the seventh straight month last month, the pace of economic recovery remains sluggish because of external and internal uncertainties, the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said yesterday.
The overall monitoring indicators, which flashed “blue” for the fifth straight month, indicating that the economic momentum remains in the doldrums, confirmed the council’s views.
The leading indicator index, which is used to gauge near-term economic outlook, increased 1.2 percent from a month earlier to 132.1 points, the council said in its monthly report.
The index’s annualized six-month rate of change, which provides a more accurate forecast of the business cycle in the near term, climbed 1.8 percentage points to 8.4 percent last month from a month ago, marking seven months of consecutive improvement, the report said.
“Despite the continuous rising trend [in the leading indicators], we are not sure that the economy has touched bottom,” Hung Jui-bin (洪瑞彬), director-general of the council’s economic research department, told a press conference.
Unlike the uptrend in the leading indicators, the total score of the monitoring indicators dropped 1 point from a month ago to 14 last month, the report showed.
Still, Hung said, overall economic sentiment this month would not be worse than last month, as most segments of the monitoring indicators showed signs of a rebound.
The latest figures on the leading indicators of the OECD and five Asian countries — China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Korea — all showed a continuing recovery, which may provide some upside catalysts for Taiwan’s economy, the council said.
Even if the economy has bottomed out in the first quarter, Hung said the trend of its recovery would be more modest compared with the recovery in 2009.
“This time, it is almost impossible for the economy to show a V-shaped rebound like in 2009,” Hung said.
In addition, external and internal uncertainties, such as stubbornly high crude oil prices, the eurozone’s debt problems, domestic fuel price hikes and impending electricity price increases, could heighten risks for the local economy in the near term, he said.
Still, he added, the overall indicators confirm that annual economic growth would turn stronger quarter by quarter this year.
The coincident index rose 0.1 percent to 127.5 points last month from a month earlier, with its trend-adjusted index dropping 0.6 percent to 94.7, the council said.
The lagging indicators stood at 139.2 points last month, up 0.1 percent from a month ago, with its trend-adjusted index decreasing 0.5 percent to 103.4, data showed.
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