Asian currencies strengthened this week as European leaders agreed on measures to ease a regional debt crisis and data suggested the US housing market is recovering from a slump.
The Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index rose on Friday by the most since Oct. 27 after EU President Herman Van Rompuy said bailout conditions tied to emergency loans for Spanish banks were relaxed and regional leaders ere looking at ways to bring down yields on bonds issued by Spain and Italy.
Led by a rising euro on Friday, the New Taiwan dollar continued its advance since Tuesday and closed the week up 0.2 percent against the US dollar at NT$29.90.
The strength of the euro came after the EU summit agreed to mobilize 120 billion euros (US$150 billion) to stimulate the ailing economy in the region, dealers said.
India’s rupee gained by the most in three years on Friday after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said reviving investor confidence was one of his top priorities. The currency tumbled 8.6 percent against the US dollar this quarter, leading declines in Asia.
The Asia Dollar Index climbed 0.8 percent this week to 115.22 in Hong Kong, trimming this quarter’s loss to 1.4 percent. South Korea’s won advanced 1 percent this week to 1,145.40 per US dollar and the Philippine peso rose 0.7 percent to 42.16, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rupee jumped 2.7 percent to 55.6375, touching a one-week high of 55.6375 earlier.
US reports this week also showed that sales of new homes climbed to a two-year high in May, while housing prices declined in April at the slowest pace since November 2010. An improving real-estate market may spur spending in the US, the biggest buyer of Asian exports.
China’s yuan rose this week, trimming its biggest quarterly loss since a US dollar peg ended in 2005. It traded at 6.3541 per US dollar, 0.16 percent stronger than its June 21 close. It has dropped 0.9 percent since the end of March.
The peso jumped 3.2 percent since May, its biggest monthly gain since September 2010, as an improving economy attracted funds to the nation’s assets. The US$200 billion economy expanded 6.4 percent in the first quarter, the fastest pace since 2010, and is projected to expand by the same rate in the second, an economics official said.
Elsewhere, Malaysia’s ringgit rose 0.8 percent this week to 3.1688 per US dollar, Indonesia’s rupiah gained 0.1 percent to 9,430 and Thailand’s baht rose 0.1 percent to 31.74.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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