Government bonds rally
Government bonds rallied yesterday, pushing the five-year yield to a 19-month low, as investors favored safer assets on concerns that the global economic recovery is faltering.
The yield on the government’s 1 percent bonds due January 2017 dropped one basis point to 0.915 percent, according to GRETAI Securities Market. It reached 0.909 percent earlier, the lowest level for benchmark five-year rates since Oct. 26, 2010.
Meanwhile, the overnight interbank lending rate was little changed at 0.511 percent, according to a weighted average compiled by the Taiwan Interbank Money Center.
Cathay, Industrial Bank ink MOU
Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), the banking arm of Cathay Financial Holdings Co (國泰金控), yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China’s Industrial Bank Co (興業銀行) for cooperation in corporate lending, consumer banking, wealth management and personnel training, the local lender said.
Nanotube venture approved
The National Science Council has approved the establishment of a company to produce carbon nanotubes at the Hsinchu Science Park.
The council on May 31 approved the NT$200 million (US$6.6 million) investment proposal to set up the company, which will be a joint venture between local investors and Japanese technology groups.
The venture will specialize in the manufacture of single and multi-walled carbon nanotubes, which can be used in touch panels or in the manufacture of batteries to greatly improve the functions and quality of a product, according to a statement by the council.
CPC shuts down plant
State-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) permanently shut down its No. 3 naphtha cracker in Greater Kaohsiung yesterday, CPC media liaison officer Jessica Tang (唐苑莉) said by telephone.
CPC will reduce ethylene supplies by 15 to 20 percent of contracted volumes as a result, she said.
Nobel winner to give lectures
Nobel laureate in economics Eric Maskin will deliver two lectures in Taipei next week that will touch on issues of financial crises and strategic voting in elections, the organizers announced yesterday.
Maskin, who won the Nobel Prize in 2007, will give talks entitled “Financial Crises: Why They Occur and What to Do about Them” and “Elections and Strategic Voting: Condorcet and Borda” on Monday and Tuesday next week respectively, Academia Sinica said in a statement.
Maskin, a professor of economics at Harvard University, received his Nobel Prize along with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory. He is also famous for his contribution to game theory, the economics of incentives and contract theory, according to the Academia Sinica statement.
Exporters coming back: Yiin
A growing number of local exporters, many of them in the machinery, textiles and basic metals sectors, are expected to set up new production bases in Taiwan instead of China, Council for Economic Planning and Development Minister Yiin Chii-ming (尹啟銘) said yesterday.
The trend of exporters “flowing back to Taiwan” is a new trend, Yiin said, citing the results of an annual survey released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs on Thursday.
In the survey conducted between Feb. 21 and March 30, 57 percent of local exporters polled said they would build new production lines in Taiwan, up 8 percentage points from the previous year, while 42 percent planned to expand capacity in China, down 8 percentage points.
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
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
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],”
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