The nation might see 60 initial public offerings (IPOs) this year, a significant increase from 39 last year, as the economy continues to improve and companies seek to improve their operations, Deloitte & Touche Taiwan said on Wednesday.
The international accounting firm’s forecast is more optimistic than those of the local branches of Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
“Sluggish IPO activity last year had to do with a lack of incentives, but continued rallies in global bourses help boost confidence and a recent tax reform also lends support,” Deloitte Taiwan managing partner Benjamin Shih (施景彬) told a media briefing in Taipei.
The legislature on Jan. 18 passed a sweeping tax bill that lowers the cap on personal income tax from 45 to 40 percent and allows investors two options for stock dividend income taxes: a flat 28 percent rate if they are combined with personal incomes or an 8.5 percent rate if handled separately.
That is positive for high-income earners and active traders, many of whom had fled the local stock markets, Shih said.
The recent rally in the TAIEX, above 11,110 points, confirmed the rise in confidence, he said.
Meanwhile, securities exchange authorities are seeking to launch an e-commerce board to grant start-ups easier access to capital as biotechnology firms have done in recent years, he added.
Nineteen firms have obtained regulatory approval to be listed on the nation’s bourses and many more are in the pipeline, Deloitte Taiwan said, adding that it aims to win more than 30 IPO clients this year to keep its market share at 49 percent, followed by PwC at 27 percent and KMPG at 20 percent.
Technology firms are upbeat about the business outlook this year and see new business opportunities linked to new technological innovations and applications, said Gordon Chen (陳明煇), a partner at Deloitte Taiwan focusing on technology, media and telecoms.
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