Local shares on Friday closed higher at 10,965.39, setting them up to tackle the 11,000-point threshold next week, analysts said.
The TAIEX on Friday closed up 10.1 points, or 0.09 percent, on turnover of NT$121.99 billion (US$4.16 billion). That was an increase of 1.3 percent from a close of 10,821.53 on April 3, the last day of trading before the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday.
The index immediately traded higher after the bourse opened, and fluctuated between a high of 10,988.23 and a low of 10,938.37 throughout the day.
The main force behind the uptick came from stocks in the optoelectronics sector, which rose by 2.37 percent, the electrical and cable sector, which rose 0.71 percent, and the semiconductor sector’s 0.29 percent increase.
Shares of Largan Precision Co (大立光), a smartphone camera lenses supplier to Apple Inc, breached the NT$3,500 mark, prompting the steady increase of stock prices among other companies in the sector.
Meanwhile, gains by producers of printed circuit boards were responsible for an increase in the electrical and cable sector.
Elsewhere in Asia on Friday, markets mostly rose as US President Donald Trump soothed concerns about military action in Syria while also sparking hopes the US could rejoin a massive Pacific-wide free-trade pact.
Trump on Wednesday sent shudders across trading floors when he warned “missiles will be coming” to Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack by the Russia-backed regime, fueling fears of a standoff between the major powers.
However, he tempered the rhetoric a day later, suggesting that he might hold off on an imminent strike while he holds talks with France and Britain on how to deal with the crisis.
As investors digested the remarks, it emerged that Trump had directed senior aides to explore rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which he left on taking office and called a US jobs killer.
The U-turn came as he suggested that the US and China might not eventually impose tariffs on each other’s goods, despite recent tit-for-tat warnings over hundreds of billions of dollars of trade.
That followed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) conciliatory speech this week promising to open up China’s economy.
The developments have provided a huge lift to markets, which were sent into turmoil when Trump on Friday last week threatened fresh tariffs on a vast array of Chinese imports, fanning fears of a trade war between the world’s top two economic powers.
Trump on Thursday also said the review of a trade pact with Canada and Mexico was “coming along great.”
“Remarkable. That’s the only thing I can really say in the past 36 hours or so about the change in tone that seems to be emanating from the president and the White House,” AxiTrader chief market strategist Greg McKenna said. “President Trump is walking back from the brink on so many fronts it’s making my head spin.”
“It’s becoming clear his tweets are part of an anchoring approach he uses in negotiations and then eases away from to achieve what he wants. It’s working on many fronts, and he’s eased back on China and Russia/Syria this week, and there was news last night he’s even reconsidering the TPP,” he added.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 on Friday rose 118.46 points, or 0.6 percent, to 21,778.74, an increase of 1 percent from 21,567.52 on April 6.
Seoul’s KOSPI on Friday ended up 12.36 points, or 0.5 percent, at 2,455.07, rising 1 percent from a close of 2,429.58 a week earlier.
However, the Shanghai Composite on Friday fell 21.11 points, or 0.7 percent, to 3,159.05, but still rose 0.9 percent from 3,131.11 on April 4.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng on Friday slid 22.90 points, or 0.1 percent, to 30,808.38, an increase of 3.2 percent from a close of 29,844.94 a week earlier.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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