The number of housing transactions last month totaled 18,505 units in the six special municipalities, a 2.8 percent decline from a month earlier, as uncertainty over the elections of local officials late last month drove buyers to the sidelines, real-estate brokers said yesterday.
Taipei reported the steepest decline at 13 percent to 2,165 deals last month, as electoral competition was the hottest there, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) said in a statement.
Judicial authorities are recounting the ballots in the city’s mayoral race at the request of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ting Shou-chung (丁守中), who has refused to concede, saying that electoral irregularities were responsible for his narrow defeat.
Taichung also posted a retreat of 8.1 percent to 3,716 units in transactions, as potential buyers preferred to wait for the election results, Evertrust said.
KMT Taichung mayor-elect Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) pledged on the campaign trail to scrap expensive railway extension projects in favor of a mass rapid transit system.
Lu’s electoral victory lent support to the wait-and-see attitude that gave potential buyers more time to make purchase decisions, Evertrust said.
Meanwhile, the number of home deals declined 9.8 percent to 2,881 units in Kaohsiung, where voters gave control of the city to the KMT for the first time in 20 years after it campaigned on an economy-first platform.
Transactions in New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Tainan picked up 5.5 percent, 3.7 percent and 3.7 percent respectively, as frontrunners carried the elections in line with pre-election polls, analysts said.
The market might see a modest and gradual recovery this month as political uncertainty subsides, said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義), the nation’s only publicly listed real-estate broker.
Total transactions in the six major cities are expected to reach 280,000 deals this year, the highest in three years, amid a stable economy, Sinyi said.
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
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