MARKETS
Stock market rating raised
Morgan Stanley has raised its rating on the Taiwan stock market to “equal weight” from “underweight,” according to a Bloomberg report. The report cited a Morgan Stanley research note as saying that the upgrade was based on improving earnings and rosier prospects in Taiwan’s technology sector this year.
Morgan Stanley also raised its forecast for the local bourse’s weighted index’s year-end target from 7,700 points to 8,650 points.
AGRICULTURE
Pineapple, lychee sales soar
The Greater Kaohsiung City Government yesterday said sales of pineapples and lychees have nearly doubled year-on-year this month, because of an increasing number of Chinese tourists. Recent heavy rains did not affect local fruit farmers’ harvest, Tsai Fu-chin (蔡復進), director-general of the Greater Kaohsiung City Government’s Agriculture Bureau, said at a fruit promotional event in Taipei.
TRADE
Trade trip generates orders
A trade promotion delegation in Hungary is expected to generate more than US$30 million (NT$897 million) in orders for Taiwan-made car and motorbike components, Taiwan’s representative office in the East European country said yesterday. The trade delegation’s 16 Taiwanese car and motorbike part suppliers held a conference in Budapest on Thursday, attracting about 60 potential Hungarian buyers.
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