AUTOMAKERS
Trade show boost expected
Four Taipei shows for motor vehicles and auto parts that closed on Saturday are expected to generate about US$600 million in business, organizers said. Dubbed Asia’s best four-in-one motoring hub, the event attracted 50,868 visitors, including a record high of 7,017 international buyers from 128 countries, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council said in a statement. Meanwhile, the 284 one-on-one procurement meetings organized on Wednesday generated US$330 million in business, the organizers said.
SECURITY
Daiwa expects sales growth
Daiwa Securities expects solid demand for smartphone chips to boost the sales of Taiwan-based integrated circuit designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) in the second quarter by 4 percent from NT$46.01 billion (US$1.53 billion) the previous quarter. In a research note released on Friday, Daiwa Securities said strong demand from China should help drive MediaTek’s smartphone chip shipments for the second quarter to 73 million units, up 12 percent from the previous quarter.
SEMICONDUCTORS
ASE proposes dividends
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (ASE, 日月光半導體) has proposed a cash dividend of NT$1.3 per share, with a dividend payout ratio of 61.6 percent based on ASE’s earnings per share of NT$2.11 for last year. The company is expected to dole out more than NT$10.16 billion in cash dividends, the firm said on Tuesday last week. ASE is also planning to make an overseas private placement of convertible bonds worth up to NT$15 billion, with the coupon rate expected not to exceed 5 percent, the company said, without disclosing a timetable for the private placement.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts