Although the government has downgraded its forecast for this year’s GDP growth to below 2 percent, market analysts said on Saturday that they remain upbeat about the performance of the local bourse, confident that the economy will pick up next year.
They said corporate earnings will continue to grow next year, which is expected to pave the way for local share prices to move higher.
Before the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) announced an update of its GDP growth prediction on Friday, the market had widely expected a downgrade to a growth level of below 2 percent, analysts said.
Despite the downgraded expectations, the TAIEX on Friday posted gains for the sixth consecutive session. In the past six sessions, the local bourse rose 307.38 points or almost 3.8 percent to close 8,406.83 points on Friday.
Wu Wen-tung (吳文通), an investment chief of Capital Investment Trust Corp (群益投信), said he has faith that the economy will improve next year, while listed companies are expected to benefit from the uptrend in terms of profitability.
The DGBAS on Friday downgraded its GDP growth target to 1.74 percent from a previous estimate of a 2.31 percent increase made in August, citing slower exports and weaker investment and consumption.
It expects the economy to grow 2.59 percent with improving exports next year. It had earlier estimated a 3.37 percent increase.
Wu said that as the local bourse is expected to continue an uptrend, he prefers select stocks including biotech, electronics for car use, cloud-based technology and Apple Inc’s iTV related businesses, as these stocks’ valuations are relatively low.
Liu Hsin-tang, a fund manager of the Yuanta Fund 2001, said that as the local stock market remains awash in liquidity, the TAIEX is likely to challenge 9,000 points.
Liu said that because the price-to-book value ratio of the local bourse currently stands at only 1.7, many local shares are cheap and attractive to many bargain hunters.
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