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.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained