STOCKS
TAIEX dips on electronics
Shares yesterday edged lower as major large-cap electronics stocks lost ground, but the weighted index remained above the 10,000-point mark at the close for the third consecutive session, dealers said. The TAIEX closed down 17.82 points, or 0.18 percent, at 10,013.67 points after moving between 9,967.97 and 10,029.62 on turnover of NT$82.766 billion (US$2.75 billion). The market opened down 11.87 points and slid steadily until hitting the day’s low shortly before noon. However, after the index fell below 10,000 points buying interest emerged, especially in the non-high-tech sector, vaulting the index back up by the end of the session, dealers said. Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co analyst Shawn Hsueh (薛舜日) said foreign institutional investors have been the main drivers of the market’s recent gains, moving funds in to take advantage of local companies’ high dividend yields and the relative stability of the New Taiwan dollar against foreign currencies.
INVESTMENT
Retirement goals slipping
Most Taiwanese have fallen short of meeting planned retirement goals, HSBC Bank (Taiwan) Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) said yesterday, citing a survey it conducted. Although prospective retirees have set goals to create retirement funding streams through diversified investments, most are overly reliant on cash savings, employer pension schemes and the social safety net provided by the government, while neglecting investments in stocks, bonds and foreign currencies, the survey showed. HSBC said that 27 percent of millennials have not begun preparing for retirement, compared with 19 percent of Generation Xers and 13 percent of baby boomers.
FOOD
Wei Chuan posts Q1 profit
Food maker Wei Chuan Foods Corp (味全食品) posted net profit of NT$46.72 million for last quarter, or earnings per share of NT$0.09, ending 10 consecutive quarters of net losses. From January through March, sales grew 2.2 percent annually to NT$3.6 billion, which the company attributed to improving customer demand. However, the company still reported an operating loss of NT$126 million, improving from NT$533 million in the red in the same period last year. Wei Chuan, a major subsidiary of Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), has been the subject of a widespread boycott of its products in Taiwan, after its parent company was implicated in 2014 in a food safety scandal involving the sale of tainted cooking oil through its subsidiaries. Since then, the company has continued to invest in improving its food safety standards, despite biased opinions from Taiwan’s netizens, it said.
MATERIALS
Shin Foong stock to debut
Shin Foong Specialty and Applied Materials Co Ltd (申豐), which mainly manufactures synthetic latex, said it plans to debut on the Taiwan Stock Exchange next month. The company, a reinvestment unit of papermaking conglomerate YFY Inc (永豐餘控股), is the nation’s largest manufacturer of styrene butadiene rubber for papermaking and has paid-in capital of NT$943 million. From January through last month, Shin Foong posted cumulative revenue of NT$1.06 billion, a 5.14 percent increase from the same period last year, on the back of increasing global demand for latex gloves.
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