Taiwan status unchanged: MSCI
Taiwan remains an emerging market on the MSCI index after its annual market classification review, the global index provider said on Tuesday.
In a statement released on its Web site, MSCI said that both Taiwan and South Korea had been removed from the review list of country indices for potential upgrade into developed markets.
“This decision is motivated by the absence of any significant improvements in key areas negatively affecting accessibility in the [South] Korean and Taiwanese equity markets for the past few years,” MSCI said in the statement.
HTC’s market down to 2%
Smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) held only a 2 percent share of the global smartphone market last year, ranking it 11th in a market dominated by Samsung Electronics Co and Apple Inc.
HTC shipped 20.35 million smartphones last year, a decline of 38 percent from the 32.86 million units it shipped in 2012, according to its annual report to shareholders published late on Tuesday.
HTC said Samsung continued to lead the global smartphone market last year with a 31.6 percent share, followed by Apple with 15.5 percent. The next three spots were taken by Huawei Technologies Co (華為), LG Electronics Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想), with market shares of between 4.5 percent and 5 percent, the report said.
New products lift Acer sales
PC vendor Acer Inc (宏碁) on Tuesday reported a 32.69 percent sequential increase in consolidated sales last month, thanks to the introduction of new tablets and smartphones.
On an annual basis, however, last month’s consolidated sales of NT$25.55 billion were down 2.91 percent, Acer said in a statement.
Cumulative sales in the first five months of the year totaled NT$121.53 billion, down 15.54 percent from a year earlier.
Quanta sales rise 14.8%
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), the world’s largest contract notebook computer maker, on Tuesday said that consolidated sales last month reached NT$70.12 billion, down 3.4 percent from a month earlier, but up 14.8 percent from a year earlier.
Quanta’s notebook shipments totaled 3.9 million units for the month, up 18 percent from April. Although shipments increased, sales last month trended lower because it shipped more low-priced models.
Consolidated sales in the first five months of the year rose 12.1 percent from a year earlier to NT$358.54 billion, the company said.
Cathay Bank, SPD sign deal
Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), the banking arm of Cathay Financial Holding Co (國泰金), yesterday inked a memorandum of understanding with China’s SPD Bank (上海浦東發展銀行) to cooperate in trade financing, yuan clearing and settlement, cash management and other businesses.
SPD Bank is the eighth Chinese lender to sign an MOU with the Taiwanese bank, which is seeking to expand its presence in China.
Established in 1993, SPD Bank has 915 branches and outlets across China.
Chunghwa gains Firefox support
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) has signed a cooperation agreement with Mozilla Corp, developer of the Firefox Web browser, to gain support for the Firefox operating system for its mobile phones. The nation’s top telecoms operator yesterday said that through the Web-based Firefox OS, it would be able to bring more value-added and customized mobile services and provide better user experience.
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