The overall credit strength of Taiwanese companies declined slightly last year due to prolonged weakness in the global economy, the unresolved European sovereign debt crisis and the nation’s weakening GDP growth, Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評) said in a recent report.
“The evolution of our rating actions was slightly negative for the past 12 months,” said Susan Chu (朱素徵), chief ratings officer at the local arm of Standard & Poor’s.
The growing negative bias bucked the upward trend of credit strength since late 2009 and cut across corporate and financial institutions, the report said.
The development has heightened industry risk, intensified market competition and weakened market demand across multiple corporate sectors, the report said.
For financial institutions, the credit evolution was largely attributable to the ratings agency’s negative outlook on the life insurance sector, which remains pressured by capital volatility and low earnings, the report said.
However, debt finance deals under Taiwan Ratings’ surveillance displayed stability last year, with no rating adjustments made on domestic fixed-income funds, the company said.
There were no defaults among the agency’s rated pool last year thanks to the non-financial corporations’ easy access to liquidity, corporate issuers’ prudent financial policy and a stable financial market, Taiwan Ratings said.
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],”
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
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