TAIEX rises slightly
The TAIEX closed up slightly yesterday as many investors scaled back their investments ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday to avoid possible negative factors from overseas during the period, dealers said.
The weighted index inched up 5.95 points, or 0.07 percent, at 7,855.97, after on turnover of NT$69.83 billion (US$2.36 billion).
“There are only three trading sessions left before the holiday. It is no surprise that turnover remained thin amid concerns about negative factors from the global financial markets during the long holiday,” Concord Securities (康和證券) analyst Kerry Huang said.
Green Energy to sell shares
Green Energy Technology Inc (綠能科技), the nation’s biggest solar wafer supplier, yesterday said its board approved the sale of all its shares of Shihlien Energy Technology Co (時聯能源) for NT$334 million, in an effort to focus on is core business.
Green Energy owns 12.56 percent, or 27.9 million shares, of Shihlien, which makes polysilicon, a key raw material to make solar wafers. The company plans to sell the share for NT$12 per share roughly, according to a company statement.
Green Energy also said it would re-evaluate the feasibility of renting manufacturing equipment and facilities from its peers to boost capacity amid growing demand for its high-efficiency solar wafers.
China’s smartphones expanding
Shipments of China-made smartphones will grow by 40 percent to 280 million units this year, the Taiwan Industrial Economics and Knowledge Research Center (IEK, 產業經濟與趨勢研究中心) forecast in a recent report.
With the dramatic price cuts and quality gains in white box smartphones — unbranded phones that clone more popular models — the smartphone market will continue to expand substantially, the center said.
China’s smartphone shipments are expected to top 470 million units in 2015 and 610 million units in 2017, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, the center forecast.
Since quad-core smartphones were unveiled last year, such specifications will be “commonly seen” among local brands and white box models this year, the report said.
More than 15 percent of China’s smartphones will use quad-core processors this year, and the ratio is expected to jump to 38 percent and 55 percent in 2015 and 2017 respectively.
China’s smartphones will be characterized as low budget and high specification models, the center said.
FTC fines Microbio over ads
The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said on Wednesday it has fined healthy food and drug developer and manufacturer Microbio Co Ltd (中天生物科技) NT$500,000 over misleading TV advertisements.
The commission said Microbio encouraged consumers to buy its sugar-free ginseng drink by insinuating that a bottle of Quaker’s ginseng drink, the most popular similar product on the market, contains the equivalent to 12 sugar cubes and is harmful to the body.
The commission said the amount of sugar in the Quaker’s product meets Department of Health standards and poses no threat to the human body. Microbio is also the developer of Chemo Young (化療漾), an oral solution for easing post-chemotherapy discomfort.
NT dollar declines
The New Taiwan dollar fell against the US dollar yesterday, as traders took hints from the weakness of other regional currencies to cut their holdings in the local unit, dealers said.
The NT dollar dropped NT$0.086 to NT$29.668 versus the greenback, with turnover of US$989 million.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by