TAIEX strong on Obama win
The TAIEX extended its momentum yesterday as the US presidential election was decided in favor of US President Barack Obama, ending an element of political uncertainty, dealers said.
Investors paid much of their attention to selected large-cap high-tech stocks, such as handheld device camera lens maker Largan Precision Co (大立光) and touch-panel supplier TPK Holding Co (宸鴻). Financial stocks also continued moving upwards on hopes of increasing cross-strait financial exchanges, they said.
Largan rose 7 percent, the maximum daily increase, to close at NT$690, while TPK gained 1.88 percent to end at NT$406.50.
The weighted index closed up 50.50 points, or 0.70 percent, at 7,287.18, after moving between 7,220.04 and 7,287.18, on turnover of NT$71.34 billion (US$2.44 billion).
Pharma companies in link-up
Taipei-based Orient Europharma Group (OEP, 友華生技) and Japan’s NanoCarrier Co inked a new license agreement on a pancreatic cancer drug yesterday and unveiled their joint investment of NT$700 million in a new plant to produce cancer drugs.
The two companies decided to continue their joint research on Nanoplatin, a chemotherapy drug in the second phase of clinical trial, four years after they started developing the drug, OEP president Peter Tsai (蔡正弘) said at the signing ceremony.
OEP said it will establish a new manufacturing subsidiary with NanoCarrier in Yunlin County to produce chemotherapy drugs given in injection form, with Nanoplatin being the first in line.
Construction on the new plant at the Central Taiwan Science Park’s (中部科學園區) Huwei Park will begin next year, and the facility is forecast to generate up to US$500 million in annual sales after its scheduled completion in 2016.
Taiwan 5th in mobile Internet
Taiwan has the world’s fifth-highest ratio of smartphone users who use mobile Internet every day, according to a survey released yesterday by Google Inc.
Some 64 percent of Taiwanese smartphone users said they surfed the Internet every day, up from 38 percent in last year’s survey, Google said.
Japan has the highest ratio of 77 percent, followed by Sweden (71 percent), the United Arab Emirates (71 percent) and Denmark (68 percent), according to the survey.
HTC set to struggle: report
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) may see its market share decline further over the year-end holiday shopping season due to the limited contribution to sales from new products, Morgan Stanley said in a note on Monday.
Morgan Stanley forecast worldwide smartphone shipments to reach 226.3 million units in the fourth quarter, a rise of 26 percent from the third quarter. HTC will ship 6.4 million smartphones during the period, which would rank it eighth with only a 2.8 percent market share, the brokerage predicted.
Morgan Stanley said Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc will remain as the top two smartphone vendors with market shares of 28 percent and 22 percent respectively.
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) is projected to rank third with a 5.3 percent share, followed by LG Electronics Inc with a 3.7 percent share, ZTE Corp (中興) with a 3.6 percent share, Nokia Oyj with a 3.5 percent share and Research In Motion Ltd with a 3.3 percent share, it said.
NT dollar stable against US
The New Taiwan dollar maintained its strength against the US dollar yesterday, edging up NT$0.075 to close at NT$29.200.
Turnover totaled US$745 million during the trading session.
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