Shining Building Business Co (鄉林建設) yesterday formally launched its luxury housing complex in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), unfazed by sluggish transactions for upscale homes.
The Taichung-based builder expects to wrap up sales for the 38 newly completed apartments by the end of this year, after having sold 60 percent during the trial sales period, Shining chairman Lai Cheng-yi (賴正鎰) said.
“Prospective buyers have doubled after the property tax settled in early June,” Lai told a media briefing in Taipei.
The contraction in existing home sales narrowed in the last two months, affirming the improvement in buying interest, the company said.
Houses in popular locations are resilient to price corrections on the back of limited land supply and expensive building materials, Lai said.
Apartments of 64 ping (211.2 m2) to 78 ping in size are relatively affordable for affluent Taiwanese who want to own a vacation home in Beitou, which is known for its hot springs and historical sites, he said.
All the apartments come with hot spring bathrooms and are priced at between NT$880,000 and NT$980,000 per ping, compared with NT$1.15 million for presale apartments in nearby Tianmu (天母), Lai said.
That means individual apartments have a price tag of NT$70 million and more, he said.
Luxury homes, especially in Taipei, have borne the brunt of unfavorable measures to cool the property market in recent years because they are subjected to selective credit controls and tax hikes.
The central bank defines luxury homes as those valued at NT$70 million in the capital, NT$60 million in New Taipei City and NT$40 million elsewhere in Taiwan. Banks are required to cap mortgage loans at 50 percent of their assessed value.
With five aboveground floors and two basement floors, the apartment complex is about a 15-minute walk from Xinbeitou MRT station.
Developers and builders are willing to cut asking prices by 5 percent to facilitate deals these days, Lai said.
The gaps between asking and closing home prices hit 20 percent in some cases in Taiwan, he said.
Shining reported a net profit of NT$208.99 million last quarter, down from NT$503.83 million in the same period last year. As of last month, the company’s cumulative revenue totaled NT$1.13 billion, also down 63 percent from a year earlier, company data showed.
Shares in Shining closed down 0.9 percent to NT$10.95 yesterday in Taipei trading.
They have dropped 41.13 percent since the beginning of the year, worse than the broader market’s 11 percent fall over the period, Taiwan Stock Exchange’s data showed.
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