The consumer price index (CPI) rose 0.9 percent last month from a year earlier, its slowest gain in five months, as hikes in fruit prices eased, although they remained the fastest in more than a decade, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The latest CPI data indicated benign inflation as food costs continued to advance more rapidly than other consumer items, suggesting heavier price burdens for low-income earners.
“Overall consumer prices have stabilized as evidenced by the smaller than 1 percent increase in the CPI reading,” DGBAS Deputy Director Tsai Yu-tai (蔡鈺泰) told a news conference in Taipei.
The inflationary gauge has hovered near the 2 percent alarm level since February due to drastic rises in vegetable and fruit prices, as bad weather from the winter and two typhoons last year continued to disrupt supply, Tsai said.
The CPI, after seasonal adjustment, edged down 0.08 percent last month, affirming an almost neutral trend, according to the agency’s monthly report.
For the second quarter, the inflationary index climbed 1.33 percent, down from 1.75 percent in the first quarter, and averaged 1.54 percent in the first half of the year, the report said.
Supply disruptions subsided last month, slowing the rise in food costs to 4.55 percent, even though fruit prices accelerated by 35.81 percent, their quickest pace of increase in 10 years and seven months, Tsai said.
Without the hike in fruit prices, the CPI would have risen only 0.14 percent, Tsai said.
Prices for fishery products, vegetables and meat increased 4.38 percent, 1.83 percent and 1.12 percent respectively from their levels a year earlier, the report said. Processed food and dinning costs gained 1.43 percent, the report said.
The absence of rainstorms or typhoons so far this summer helped stabilize food prices, Tsai said.
Transportation and communications costs declined a 1.46 percent as distortions in crude oil prices tapered off, the report said.
Housing and living prices dropped 0.75 percent last month because the fall in gas and utility prices more than muted the 5.37 percent rise in water charges, the report said.
The core CPI, which is a more reliable indicator of long-term inflation because it excludes volatile items, increased 0.8 percent, smaller than its 0.91 percent rise in May, lending support to price stabilization, the report said.
The wholesale price index (WPI) — a measure of production costs — fell 2.67 percent last month from a year earlier, stable from a 2.72 percent decline in May, the report said.
Stripping foreign exchange volatility, export prices averaged 6.2 percent lower last month from a year earlier, posing continued challenge for export data to return to positive territory in June.
The WPI dropped 3.19 percent last quarter, easing from 4.99 percent decline in the first quarter, and shrank 4.1 percent for the first six months, the report said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS