Giga Solar plans China plants
Solar material producer Giga Solar Materials Corp (碩禾電子) plans to invest US$10 million to establish production lines in China, eyeing the domestic market there.
The company said yesterday its board had approved the investment plan. The preliminary plan is to set up plants in China’s Jiangsu Province or Zhejiang Province, Giga Solar said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
The Hsinchu-based company’s business focuses on photovoltaic conductive pastes for solar cells. The investment in China needs to gain regulatory approval in Taiwan.
Sime Darby sets sales goal
Sime Darby Kia Taiwan Co (台灣森納美起亞), which distributes Kia cars in Taiwan, aims to sell 4,000 cars in the local market by the end of next year, the company said.
The firm yesterday launched the locally assembled Carens, a seven-seater multipurpose vehicle, after introducing three new car models to Taiwan over the past month — the Morning subcompact, Optima sedan and Soul crossover.
Sime Darby Kia said it had sold 35 locally manufactured Morning cars from Nov. 13 through yesterday, while the imported Optima and Soul models are expected to hit the local market by the end of next month, the company said.
EVA Air expands codeshare
EVA Airways Corp (EVA, 長榮航空) and Singapore Airlines Ltd yesterday started code-sharing their flights to the US and Canada, expanding a codeshare agreement between the two carriers on the Taipei-Singapore route.
Singapore Airlines passengers will now be able to fly to Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, as well as Toronto and Vancouver from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, according to EVA.
“This mutually beneficial partnership gives both EVA Air and Singapore Airlines passengers more flexibility in their flight itineraries,” EVA executive vice president Glenn Chai (翟健華) said in a statement.
Banks may face risks: Fitch
Taiwanese banks may face potential downside risks from rising exposure in China and a protracted slowdown in advanced economies and China, adding to pressure on their credit profiles, Fitch Ratings Ltd said yesterday.
The Taiwanese banking sector’s aggregate exposure in China, mainly focused on lending to Taiwanese firms operating in the nation, is moderate at about 10 percent of their total assets as of June 30, Fitch Ratings said.
“Fitch expects the exposures to rise to 15 percent by 2016, with the credit quality in exposures in China likely to weaken as the banks expand to provide loans to local borrowers on the mainland,” the agency said in a statement.
CTCI office building space sells
A British Virgin Islands-registered company on Thursday bought partial floors of the upscale CTCI (中鼎工程) office building in Taipei’s Dunhua S Road for NT$2.845 billion (US$90.96 million) through an auction, 0.4 percent higher than the asking price, bidding organizer Savills Taiwan Ltd (第一太平洋戴維斯) said.
The one above-ground floor and one basement floor of the CTCI building have a total floor space of 3,751.63 ping (12,402m2). The transaction translates into NT$793,000 per ping, according to Savills.
The floors represent the remaining underlying assets of the Gallop No. 1 real-estate investment trust fund issued by Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) in 2007. They were put on the market again after failing to secure a buyer in the previous auction last month.
CHT outlook stable: S&P
Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has revised its outlook on Chunghwa Telecom Co (CHT, 中華電信) to “stable” from “negative,” while affirming its “AA” long-term rating citing the company’s dominant market position and strong financial profile.
“We revised the outlook because we believe that proposed deregulation that could weaken CHT’s dominant market position in fixed-line business is unlikely to materialize in the next one to two years,” S&P said in a statement.
The growing penetration of 4G and cable TV services will also help offset the company’s declining fixed-line business, it added.
Combined sales down slightly
The nation’s listed companies saw their combined sales on a consolidated basis increase last month from a year earlier, but decline from the previous month, according to tallies compiled by the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE).
Based on the stock exchange’s latest statistics released on Thursday, the aggregate sales of 810 listed companies totaled NT$2.576 trillion last month, up 4.79 percent from a year ago, but 0.62 percent lower than in October.
In the first 11 months of the year, the aggregate sales of all listed companies amounted to NT$25.67 trillion, up 6.04 percent from a year ago. Among them, 525 firms saw total revenue rise annually, while 286 firms reported declining sales, the TWSE said.
PlayStation heading to China
Sony Corp is to offer its PlayStation consoles in China from next month, the company said yesterday, following rival Microsoft Corp into the potentially lucrative market after China ended a 14-year ban.
The company will launch the PlayStation 4 in China on Jan. 11, priced at 2,899 yuan (US$475), Sony said in a press release, adding that pre-sales started yesterday.
The company’s handheld game console PlayStation Vita will also be available, with a price tag of 1,299 yuan, Sony said.
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