FSC touts deregulation
Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman William Tseng (曾銘宗) said that a plan to allow wider share price fluctuations in the local bourse to allow daily increases or drops of up to 10 percent, from the current 7 percent, would be unveiled later this month or early next month, as the commission is discussing the matter with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the GRETAI Securities Market and the Taiwan Securities Association before finalizing the plan.
Tseng made the remark on
Saturday during an interview with Wealth publishing group chairman Hsieh Chin-ho (謝金河) on a business news program on Eastern TV News, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported.
Tseng also said the commission is planning more deregulation, as well as complementary measures, in a bid to improve local capital markets, the report said.
Semiconductor BB ratio falls
The book-to-bill (BB) ratio for North America-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers, such as Applied Materials Inc, dropped below one — to 0.98 — last month, industry association SEMI said on Friday.
The three-month average of worldwide bookings was US$1.37 billion in orders last month, down 1.1 percent year-on-year, but up 12.3 percent month-on-month, SEMI said in a statement.
As the three-month average of worldwide billings also rose 3.1 percent year-on-year to US$1.39 billion and 17 percent month-on-month, the book-to-bill ratio fell to 0.98 last month from 1.02 in November last year, the association said.
A ratio of 0.98 means that US$98 worth of orders were received for every US$100 of product billed during the month.
A ratio of above one implies a more optimistic outlook, while a ratio of less than one suggests weakness.
AUO to recruit 1,500 workers
AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD maker, plans to recruit 1,500 engineers this year to expand its technology workforce, the company said in a statement on Friday.
The new recruits require backgrounds in the fields of process equipment, display development, electronics and integration testing, the company said.
About 100 engineers from the new hires will be assigned to work in the company’s sixth-generation factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China, AUO said.
Acer notebook market share up
Acer Inc (宏碁) expects to continue to win more ground from rivals in consumer notebooks in the domestic market amid its efforts to achieve double-digit local sales growth in the first quarter of this year.
In the second half of last year, Acer’s Taiwan market share in consumer notebooks had increased from 18 percent in September to 23 percent in November and 23.9 percent last month, Acer president of Taiwan operations Towny Huang (黃鐘鋒) said on Friday, adding that the figure is expected to hit 25 percent by the end of March.
The company’s local revenue in the fourth quarter of last year grew 5 percent from a year earlier, Huang said.
The company is also bidding for school projects to adopt laptops that run Google Inc’s Chrome operating system, in a move to cash in on the niche computer category, he said.
Low birth rate a concern: NDC
Taiwan’s declining birth rate will soon take a toll on the nation’s workforce, the National Development Council (NDC) said on Tuesday last week, adding that the working population would fall by an average of 180,000 people annually from 2016.
The council estimated that the size of the working population aged between 15 and 64 would reach its peak at 17.37 million people this year and begin to slip next year until 2060, resulting in increasingly large personnel shortages.
The demographic dividend that has helped catalyze the nation’s economic development in the past will also come to an end in about a decade, the council said.
The demographic dividend refers to the period of time when the workforce in a nation accounts for more than two-thirds of the total population.
Due to the impact of declining births and an aging society, the council estimated that the demographic dividend will end in 2028.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to