Presale housing projects totaled NT$351.53 billion (US$11.57 billion) in northern Taiwan in the first half of the year, a decrease of 19 percent from the same period last year, as developers and builders seek to reduce inventory and refrain from expansion, despite an improving economy, the Chinese-language Housing Monthly said yesterday.
“By slowing the launches of presale projects, builders and developers aim to ease price correction pressures on their newly completed buildings,” Housing Monthly (住展雜誌) research manager Ho Shih-chang (何世昌) said by telephone.
There remains a price gap of up to 15 percent between buyers and sellers, but the supply side is unwilling to concede, as the market for existing homes has seen a marked rebound this year and authorities have supported builders, Ho said.
In Taipei, where authorities impose holding costs on owners of more than one home, has reduced the so-called “property hoarding tax” from 3.6 percent to 1.5 percent.
However, the cut would not help spur buyers’ interest, but would allow builders and developers to save on tax, making them less willing to lower prices, Ho said.
The decline is broad-based except for Yilan County, where presale projects increased 37.5 percent year-on-year to NT$12.49 billion in the first six months, as housing prices held relatively firm and people are moving there, Ho said.
Keelung saw the steepest fall, at 78 percent, the magazine said.
Drastic swings in the volume of presale housing projects are common in Keelung, due to its relatively small market, Ho said.
The situation was less gloomy in and around Taipei.
Presale projects dropped 8.4 percent to NT$84.87 billion in Taipei in the first half and fell 7.5 percent to NT$158.89 billion in New Taipei City, the report said.
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