Large traders held back from local equities last year due to volatility on global stock markets, although listed firms on the main bourse saw their combined revenue rise 7.33 percent for the whole of last year and the average daily turnover expanded 24.16 percent to NT$130.21 billion (US$4.23 million), according to data released by the Financial Supervisory Commission and the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Large traders are defined as those who trade shares at or higher than NT$500 million in a quarter, Securities and Futures Bureau Deputy Director-General Tsai Li-ling (蔡麗玲) told a news conference on Thursday.
The number of large traders fell to 1,137 in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with 1,507 in the third quarter and a record level of 1,579 in the second quarter, the data showed.
A quarterly drop of 370 large traders marked not only the highest quarterly fall since the 552 recorded in the second quarter of 2012, but also reflected the impact of negative factors such as a more than 10 percent decline in the TAIEX in October, volatile US equity markets and concerns over the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, Tsai told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday.
While the number of large traders was on the decline, it still remained more than 1,000 for the sixth consecutive quarter as the listed firms’ fundamentals remained sound, Tsai said.
Aggregate revenue at the 928 firms listed on the main bourse totaled NT$32.78 trillion last year, up NT$2.24 trillion from 2017, with 608 firms’ revenue rising and 320 falling, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) retained its title as the nation’s largest listed firm in terms of annual revenue with NT$5.29 trillion, up 12.5 percent from a year earlier and a new record.
Pegatron Corp (和碩) was in second place, generating NT$1.34 trillion in revenue, up 12.3 percent from 2017, ahead of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), whose revenue hit NT$1.03 trillion, up 5.5 percent, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) came in fourth, with revenue edging up 0.6 percent to NT$1.02 billion, ahead of Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) with NT$967.68 billion, up 9 percent year-on-year.
Most sectors reported positive revenue growth last year, while three — optoelectronics, communications and the Internet, and automobiles — reported declines of 8.36 percent, 5.53 percent and 1 percent respectively, the data showed.
The best-performing sectors were building materials and construction, cement, and oil and gas, with revenue increases of 29.37 percent, 26.01 percent and 22.67 percent respectively.
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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