Consumer confidence showed signs of stabilization this month due mainly to the recovery in the local bourse and stable jobless rates, a survey by Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) and Roy Morgan Research found yesterday.
The ANZ-Roy Morgan Taiwan Consumer Confidence rose to 91.3 this month, up 0.2 percentage points from last month, but remained lower from a year earlier, the survey said.
“Household sentiment seems to have stabilized this month, attributable chiefly to a mild recovery of the stock market and low unemployment figures,” ANZ’s Hong Kong-based economist Raymond Yeung (楊宇霆) said in the survey.
The TAIEX lost 1.8 percent so far this month with rallies ahead of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) meeting on Nov. 7 with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping (習近平) and last week’s scrapping of the capital gains tax on stock investments.
Tourism provided a buffer for the labor market, keeping the unemployment rate at 3.9 percent last month, the lowest in 15 years for the same month, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said on Monday.
Seven percent of respondents said their families are better off financially compared with last year. That represented an increase of 1.55 percentage points from one month earlier, the survey indicated.
About 11.6 percent of the respondents said they expected their families to be better off next year, an increase of 1.5 percentage points from last month, the survey said.
Still, Taiwanese have misgivings about the economy going forward after GDP growth contracted 1.01 percent last quarter.
Yeung expected DGBAS to cut growth data further for this and next year on Friday, in light of continued declines in major economic indicators such as exports, export orders and industrial output.
Policymakers might introduce more stimulus measures to boost private consumption, the economist said, noting that the government has provided subsidies for domestic tourism and purchases of home appliances.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained