New Zealand and China are in talks about making their currencies directly convertible, aiming to reduce costs as trade between the two countries is targeted to surge 33 percent in the next two years.
The talks were initiated during New Zealand Prime Minister John Key’s visit to China last month, his spokeswoman Lesley Hamilton said by telephone on Sunday, confirming an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal.
The negotiations are in an early stage and are progressing without a specific timeframe, she said.
New Zealand’s exports to China jumped 32 percent in the first quarter, surpassing shipments to Australia for the first time, led by dairy products, logs and meat.
The currency talks are under way as New Zealand targets NZ$20 billion (US$16.2 billion) in two-way annual trade with China by 2015 from about NZ$15.2 billion in the year ended March.
“By having direct convertibility, that would reduce the transaction cost of doing business with China,” said Jane Turner, an economist at ASB Bank Ltd in Auckland. “It reduces the cost of hedging and the risk of currencies moving against you, and you can become more competitive in your pricing.”
The People’s Bank of China yesterday raised the daily yuan fixing to 6.1811 per US dollar, the strongest level since a peg ended in July 2005. The currency fell 0.09 percent to 6.1274 per US dollar at 12:52pm in Shanghai.
The New Zealand dollar fell to US$0.8077 at 4:52pm in Wellington.
New Zealand’s sales to China amounted to NZ$2.31 billion in the three months ended March 31, Statistics New Zealand said in an April 26 report.
Exports to Australia fell 7.3 percent to NZ$2.17 billion, the lowest since early 2008 and the first calendar quarter it fell behind China.
New Zealand became the first developed nation to sign a free-trade agreement with China in 2008. In the 12 months through March, exports rose 25 percent to NZ$7.41 billion, still lagging behind NZ$9.74 billion of shipments to Australia.
“We’re looking for as fast an outcome as we can get,” Key told reporters in Wellington yesterday. “The indications I got from the Chinese side were that it was possible for us to do it quite quickly.”
Direct trading between the yuan and the Australian dollar began last month, making the Aussie the third currency to be directly convertible with China’s, following the US dollar and the Japanese yen.
Direct trading means the fixing will be computed without involving a cross rate with the US dollar.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”