Credit Suisse yesterday said Taiwan’s current political turmoil would shock the local stock market, but the impact would be limited.
“Political uncertainties may cause impacts to TAIEX in the short term, but we forecast the shocks will not last too long,” Credit Suisse analysts Chung Hsu (許忠維) told reporters on the sidelines of the brokerage’s 14th Asian Technology Conference in Taipei.
Hsu’s comment followed the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) revoking the membership of Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) yesterday and thereby his legislator-at-large status and the speakership.
The most important factors driving the performance of the stock market in any country are capital and the trends in each different industry, said Albert Park, managing director and head of Asia Pacific cash equities sales at Credit Suisse.
Park said political disputes can be a factor of each country’s stock market, but only in the short term and thus should not be seen as a major factor when predicting Taiwan’s long-term stock market movement.
Turning to consumer electronic products, Credit Suisse analysts told reporters that they forecast demand for high-end smartphones would remain lukewarm through 2015.
Credit Suisse forecast shipment of smartphone products that are priced between US$200 and US$400 would remain strong over the next two years.
The Switzerland-based brokerage said the rising penetration of sub-US$200 smartphone products in emerging markets would continue to strongly drive the segment, adding that overall smartphone sales and shipments would likely grow more than 20 percent this year and 14 percent next year.
Given that the high-end smartphone market is reaching the saturation point, mid-sized tablet models equipped with 7-inch to 13-inch displays are expected to become the next sales driver for PC brands, the brokerage forecast.
It predicted that shipment of mid-sized tablets equipped with 7-inch to 13-inch displays would achieve a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent in the period from 2011 and 2015.
“Current consumer preference for smaller 7 to 8-inch tablets still leaves the door open for innovative products to come in and capture the market for more than 10-inch screen size devices,” Credit Suisse analyst Manish Nigam said.
“If the Windows-Intel camp fails to appeal to the consumer over the next product cycle starting next quarter, we believe the Android and the Apple ecosystems would continue to narrow the gap both in terms of hardware and availability of productivity and content-driven applications on their respective operating systems,” he added.
Hsu said he expected the TAIEX to see a moderate upside and cross the 8,500 benchmark by the end of the year, as a better US economic recovery will be partly offset by a weaker consumer tech cycle and slower economic growth in China.
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