Export orders last month climbed 5.2 percent annually to US$35.97 billion, outperforming the government’s estimate mainly due to persistent robust demand for information technology and communication (ICT) products, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
The result beat the ministry’s forecast of 3.8 percent annual growth and represented the sixth consecutive month of annual expansion, the ministry’s data showed.
“Smartphones, high-end notebook computers, servers and storage devices were the main growth drivers,” Department of Statistics Director-General Lin Lee-jen (林麗貞) told a news conference.
On an annual basis, orders for ICT and electronics products — the pillar of export orders — rose 6.7 percent and 1.4 percent to US$10.55 billion and US$9.46 billion respectively, the data showed.
Lin said continued robust demand for TV panels drove orders for precision instruments to US$2.02 billion last month, increasing as much as 17.6 percent from the same period last year.
She said that rising crude oil and raw material prices lent support to the orders for steel, petrochemicals, and plastics and rubber products last month.
Crude oil prices last month climbed more than 90 percent from the same period last year, Lin added.
The US remained Taiwan’s largest export destination, with orders growing 4.8 percent year-on-year to US$10.15 billion on the back of increasing demand for ICT products, she said.
Orders from China and Hong Kong also added 5.5 percent to US$8.71 billion from a year ago, she said.
Orders from Japan grew 5.3 percent annually to US$1.97 billion, ending 28 months of annual decline as the impact from a Japanese TV and notebook maker’s exit from the market came to an end, Lin said.
Lin declined to name the Japanese company.
However, it is known that Toshiba Corp has over the past two years sold its TV business in North America and Europe, and reduced TV manufacturing orders to Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶).
Toshiba last year also left the consumer notebook market, cutting its consumer notebook orders to Pegatron Corp (和碩), Compal, Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) and Wistron Corp (緯創).
Toshiba’s moves affected export orders from Japan, leading to 28 consecutive months of annual decline in orders, an official at the ministry, who declined to be named, told the Taipei Times.
Lin said the ministry expects export orders to increase between 12 percent and 15.7 percent annually to US$31 billion and 32 billion respectively.
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