TUTORING SERVICES
Bexcellent up 34% on IPO
Shares of Bexcellent Group Holdings Ltd (精英匯集團控股), whose top tutor earns more than HK$40 million (US$5.1 million) a year, yesterday surged as much as 34 percent on their first day of trading in Hong Kong. The provider of tutoring services to Hong Kong secondary-school students was so popular that individual investors placed orders for about 289 times the stock initially available to them. Bexcellent raised HK$135 million in its initial public offering (IPO) after pricing the shares near the top of a marketed range. This was in contrast to Xiaomi Corp (小米), which two weeks ago priced its IPO at the low end. Bexcellent shares closed at HK$1.32, a 22 percent gain from the IPO price of HK$1.08.
RANKINGS
Largan tops Asia300 list
Smartphone camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co (大立光) topped Nikkei’s Asia300 list of the 325 fastest-growing and most valuable companies in the region, excluding Japan. The Nikkei Asian Review, which produced the list, said it used five criteria to determine the ranking: average revenue and net profit growth, return on equity, net profit margin and the ratio of shareholder equity to total assets over the past five years. India’s TCL Technologies Holding Ltd came in second, ahead of Indonesian property developer Bumi Serpong Damai, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) tied with Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) in fourth place, Nikkei said.
PLASTICS
FPC executive out on bail
Taipei prosecutors yesterday released former high-ranking Formosa Plastics Corp (FPC, 台塑) executive Lee Sun-ju (李孫儒) on NT$5 million (US$163,634) bail as he faces allegations of receiving tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars in kickbacks from the firm’s suppliers. Lee was questioned yesterday at the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office for suspected contraventions of the Securities and Exchange Act (證券交易法). He was in charge of procurement in his role as deputy general manager of the information technology department.
TRADE
TAITRA official upbeat
Taiwan has spent the past few years diversifying its export markets and promoting industrial transformation, which should help minimize the effects of the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China, a Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) official said on Thursday. “Even if the US-China trade war drags on, Taiwan must be prepared, but not panic,” TAITRA vice chairman Liu Shih-chung (劉世忠) said at a seminar sponsored by the Stimson Center on the impact of the trade dispute. TAITRA contacted China-based Taiwanese businesses before the trade dispute began and several forecast that it would take three to six months to gauge its impact, Liu said. “Taiwan will unavoidably be affected if the US-China trade war develops into a long drawn-out affair,” Liu said.
INVESTMENT
Green loans, bonds surge
As of the end of May, domestic banks’ total outstanding loans to the green energy sector stood at NT$1.089 trillion, while insurance companies’ investment in power plants using renewable energy sources reached NT$7.48 billion, Financial Supervisory Commission statistics showed. In addition, NT$41.8 billion of green bonds were sold in Taiwan. The numbers were up by NT$44.2 billion, NT$2.13 billion and NT$21.2 billion respectively from the levels recorded at the end of last year.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
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