Credit Suisse Group AG yesterday gave a reserved outlook for the TAIEX in the final quarter of this year due to slowing corporate earnings growth following marked gains in the first half.
Taiwanese companies’ earnings growth began to slow in May, followed by consecutive annual declines in monthly profits, dragging on this quarter’s results, Credit Suisse Taiwan market strategist Chung Hsu (許忠維) said at a news conference in Taipei for the 18th Credit Suisse Asian Technology Conference.
In the first eight months of the year, Taiwanese firms’ earnings-per-share performance grew 23 percent in US dollar terms, compared with 14 percent for the whole of last year, Hsu said.
Hsu, who kept a year-end forecast for the TAIEX unchanged at 10,200 points, said that a rebound is expected to propel the weighted index to 11,000 next year.
Local companies could also see reduced foreign exchange pressure as the strength of the New Taiwan dollar continues to stabilize in the second half, Hsu said.
Further buying by foreign institutional investors is likely to be limited, following strong net buying totaling US$8.7 billion at the end of last month, Hsu said, adding that continued momentum would be dependent on retail investors, as large domestic institutional investors, such as life insurers, have poured more than US$9.6 billion into stocks in the past 12 months.
Foreign institutional investors have raised their weighting on the technology sector, increasing it to 90 percent this year, compared with 60 percent a year ago, Hsu added.
While optimism about a trio of iPhones that are expected to be unveiled this month — the most anticipated iteration since the iPhone 6 in 2014 — have propped up technology stocks, price performance has begun to outpace earnings revisions, said Randy Abrams, head of Credit Suisse’s Taiwan equities and Asian semiconductors research.
Newer areas, such as automotive electronics, cloud data center build-outs, Internet of Things applications, voice assistants, gaming and artificial intelligence will continue to help to diversify demand, Abrams said.
In particular, following bitcoin’s meteoric surge this year, demand has been rising for hardware used in mining the cryptocurrency, such as video cards, he added.
While crytocurrencies are still considered a niche asset, they have generated tangible sales growth for companies such as Nvidia Corp, while demand for mining could also boost other areas, including memory and data center equipment, which are supplied by Taiwanese companies.
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