TAIEX drops on global worries
The TAIEX pulled back yesterday on profit taking as concerns over the global economy escalated after the US Federal Reserve cut its economic outlook, dealers said.
Financial stocks suffered the heaviest downward pressure after the local media reported that negotiations between Taiwan and China on investment protection had hit a snag, dealers said.
The weighted index closed down 55.58 points, or 0.76 percent, at 7,279.05. Turnover during the session totaled NT$59.59 billion (US$2 billion).
Job vacancies decline slightly
The job vacancy rate was 2.84 percent in February, down 0.52 percentage points from the year-earlier level, due to the economic slowdown, according to the results of a biannual survey released by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics yesterday.
There were 201,923 job vacancies in the industrial and service sectors as of the end of February, a decrease of 33,000 from the same time last year, the survey showed.
The manufacturing industry accounted for 84,017, or 41.6 percent, of the vacancies in February. The wholesale and retail industries accounted for 36,879, or 18.3 percent, while the financial and insurance industries accounted for 12,765, or 6.3 percent.
Northern firms pay more taxes
Businesses in northern Taiwan contributed the most to the national coffers compared with other areas this year, excluding tax returns from undistributed earnings, the Ministry of Finance said on Tuesday.
Tax returns filed by businesses this year — including overall earnings last year and undistributed earnings in 2010 — in northern Taiwan totaled NT$77.23 billion as of the end of last month, lower than NT$79.9 billion in tax returns filed by businesses in Taipei, the ministry said.
However, excluding tax returns filed by local companies, revenue from business income tax in northern Taiwan totaled NT$64.54 billion, marking the highest level of five tax administrations in Taiwan and the only one growing from a year ago, data showed.
Formosa 5 ranked among best
A new supercomputer developed by the National Center for High-performance Computing was recently listed among the top 500 super systems in the world, affirming Taiwan’s strength in cluster computing research, the center said on Wednesday.
Taiwan’s largest self-made cloud-computing system — Formosa 5 — was ranked 232nd in the world on the TOP500 list announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany on Monday.
The main feature of the system is a graphic processing unit cluster that allows it to carry out several simultaneous calculations quickly and accurately, the center said.
Formosa 5 is set to be released late next month for use in the public, private and academic sectors, the center said.
Quanta founder donates to NTU
One of the co-founders of Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), C.C. Leung (梁次震), yesterday donated NT$570 million extra to his alma mater, National Taiwan University, to expand a physics research institute he helped establish five years ago with a NT$205 million donation.
The money will be used to set up a sustainability fund and build a new office building for the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics, according to Pisin Chen (陳丕燊), director of the center and a former classmate of Leung’s.
NT dollar dips
The New Taiwan dollar fell against the US dollar yesterday, declining NT$0.024 to close at NT$29.902.
Turnover totaled US$537 million during the trading session.
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