ELECTRONICS
CHPT hits record revenue
Chunghwa Precision Test Tech Co (CHPT, 中華精測) yesterday reported revenue of NT$257.16 million (US$8.36 million) for last month, the highest for the month of November in the company’s history and raising the possibility that the firm could post record-high revenue for the fourth quarter. Last month’s figure grew 3.68 percent from October and represented an increase of 80.9 percent from the same month a year earlier, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The firm attributed the strong annual growth to robust demand for its probe card testing services along with the launch of new handset chips by semiconductor makers. Aggregated revenue in the first 11 months of the year totaled NT$3.06 billion, up 4.09 percent from NT$2.94 billion last year.
KEYPAD MAKERS
Ichia revenue down 9.65%
Handset keypad maker Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技) yesterday reported consolidated revenue of NT$596.18 million for last month, down 20.1 percent from October and falling 9.65 percent from a year earlier. Revenue for the first 11 months of this year totaled NT$6.68 billion, up 1.46 percent annually from NT$6.58 billion, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Sales generated from flexible printed circuit integrated components reached NT$430 million last month, accounting for 72 percent of total sales, with the remainder coming from mechanical integrated components, Ichia said.
ELECTRONICS
Concord raises cash to invest
Concord Industries Ltd (華新特殊鋼), a subsidiary of power cable manufacturer Walsin Lihwa Corp (華新麗華), has decided to raise NT$82 million in fresh funds to invest in Yantai Walsin Stainless Steel Co (煙台華新不銹鋼). Concord’s board of directors yesterday approved the investment plan by issuing new shares, with the capital increase wholly injected by the parent company, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
HOSPITALITY
FPG plans lakeside hotel
Formosa Plastics Group (FPG, 台塑集團), the nation’s largest industrial conglomerate, is planning to build a hotel at the site of Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp’s (台灣化學纖維) idle plant near Longtan Lake in Yilan County, as the group works to revitalize its assets. Sandy Wang (王瑞瑜), an FPG management team member and chairwoman of Formosa Biomedical Technology Co (台塑生醫), at the group’s sports day on Sunday said beautiful scenery and hot springs are expected to attract guests to the hotel. The group is expected to finalize the plan — its first foray into the tourism sector — by next year.
INSURANCE
Shinkong’s S&P rating raised
S&P Global Ratings has raised its long-term financial strength and issuer credit ratings for Shinkong Insurance Co Ltd (新光產險) to “A” from “A-” on an improved financial risk profile, adding that the company is likely to maintain strong capitalization and a prudent hedging policy, as well as focusing on quality investments with good credit over the next two years. “The upgrade reflects our view that Shinkong Insurance has effectively controlled its foreign-exchange risk exposure at a manageable level,” S&P credit analyst Serene Hsieh (謝雅瑛) said in a statement on Nov. 23. “This has led us to revise upward our assessment of the insurer’s overall financial risk profile from strong to very strong.”
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,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
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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