Share prices up
The TAIEX yesterday closed up 73 points at 7,811.64, taking its cue from a strong surge on Wall Street overnight.
Turnover was NT$111.53 billion (US$3.86 billion).
The local market will remain optimistic due to relatively loose liquidity prior to the Lunar New Year holiday and because the government tends to introduce policies favoring market growth in the run up to the holiday, an analyst said.
Cathay profits increase sharply
Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金控), the nation’s largest financial services provider by assets, earned NT$17.03 billion in accumulative income last year, jumping 53 percent from 2011, as profits of its banking and life insurance subsidiaries increased sharply from a year earlier.
The results equaled earnings per share (EPS) of NT$1.6, ranking fourth place after Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控) and Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金控), their filings showed.
Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰人壽) posted NT$3.3 billion in net profit last year, from NT$500 million in 2011, while net income at Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) rose from NT$11.1 billion to NT$13.07 billion, the conglomerate said on Wednesday.
Tax revenue declines
Tax revenue declined 20.8 percent from a year earlier to NT$86.8 billion last month, driving overall tax revenue last year to NT$1.779 trillion, up 0.8 percent from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
The NT$1.779 trillion level in tax revenue last year marked the highest level in history, but missed the ministry’s target of NT$1.823 trillion, the ministry said in its monthly report.
Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳), deputy director of the finance ministry’s statistics department, attributed the shortfall in tax revenue to the sharp decline in revenue from securities transaction tax.
Revenue from securities transaction tax posted a decrease of 23.8 percent to NT$71.6 billion last year, translating into a shortfall of about NT$54.94 billion, the report said.
Elan reports drop in revenue
Elan Microelectronics Corp (義隆電子), which supplies touch-screen driver integrated circuits for Google Inc’s Nexus 7 tablets, yesterday said revenue dropped 15.4 percent last month to NT$524 million, from NT$612 million a month earlier.
That represented an annual growth of 24.1 percent from NT$422 million. Last month, revenues from touch controller chips and touch pads accounted for 60 percent.
In the fourth quarter of last year Elan’s revenue fell 8.4 percent quarter-on-quarter to NT$1.86 billion. The decline is bigger than the 7.5 percent quarterly contraction Elan forecast in October last year.
Record number of BMWs sold
A total of 11,002 BMW cars were sold in Taiwan last year, the highest number in history, the brand’s local distributor said yesterday.
The figure represents continued growth from 2011, when local BMW sales exceeded 10,000 units for the first time, Universal Pan German Organization (UPGO) said.
Meanwhile, statistics from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications shows that 12,923 BMWs (including parallel imports) obtained license plates last year, up 5.6 percent from the previous year. The number translates into a market share of 3.5 percent, the third-largest among European car brands after Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz.
BMWs are attractive to Taiwanese drivers due to ease of driving and fuel-saving technologies, UPGO 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],”
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