TAIEX rises above 7,300
The TAIEX rebounded yesterday, rising above 7,300 points by the end of the session, after a slump the previous day caused by worries over debt problems in the eurozone, dealers said.
Buying focused on selected large-cap high-tech stocks such as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), as well as certain financial shares, helping the market recoup most of the losses in the previous session, they said.
The benchmark index closed up 122.20 points, or 1.69 percent, at 7,356.77, after moving between 7,274.32 and 7,356.77. Turnover during the session totaled NT$77.86 billion (US$2.63 billion).
At the end of the session, machinery, electronics and financial stocks scored the highest gains among the eight largest sectors of the market, finishing up 2 percent.
Elpida in TDR buy-back
Bankrupt Japanese memory chip maker Elpida Memory Inc has agreed to buy back its outstanding Taiwan depositary receipts (TDRs) at a price of NT$6.95 per unit, Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center chairman Chiu Chin-ting (邱欽庭) said on Wednesday.
Chiu said Elpida has remitted NT$316.36 million to Taiwan, enough to buy back 80 percent of the outstanding TDRs.
Chiu said the Japanese company will decide whether to remit more money to Taiwan based on the number of investors who asked the government-funded protection center to help with their claims.
New shipping route launched
Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運), the nation’s largest container shipping firm by fleet size, announced on Wednesday it would launch a new West Africa service with -Hanjin Shipping Co of South Korea and United Arab Shipping Company (UASC) of Kuwait at the end of the month.
Four ships between 2,800 and 3,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) will be deployed in the joint service.
Evergreen and UASC will deploy one vessel each, with the other two ships operated by Hanjin, the company said in a release.
“The new service will provide an efficient transshipment link to the Far East and Europe and extend Evergreen’s global service network to West Africa,” the release said.
The 28-day round-trip will depart and arrive in the same city — Spain’s Algeciras, followed by three pickup stopovers in Nigeria’s Lagos, Ghana’s Tema and Ivory Coast’s Abidjan.
The first sailing is planned from Algeciras on May 30.
Taiwan logistics ranking rises
Taiwan’s global logistics rankings went up one notch to 19th this year, according to a World Bank report published on Tuesday.
Taiwan’s score was 3.71 this year and its overall performance was 86.6 percent, while top-ranked Singapore had a score of 4.13, the bank’s latest Logistics Performance Indicators showed.
Taiwan’s rankings have continued to improve in the last three surveys, moving from 21st in 2007 to 20th in 2010, and 19th this year.
The top 10 countries in this year’s rankings were Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Japan, the US and the UK.
NT dollar rises against dollar
The New Taiwan dollar rose against the US dollar yesterday, gaining NT$0.075 to close at NT$29.560.
Turnover totaled US$674 million during the trading session.
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