The US-China trade dispute poses a tough challenge for Taiwan, but the government’s quick response has helped turn the threat into an opportunity by facilitating a huge repatriation of Taiwanese capital, the minutes of the central bank’s June 20 meeting released yesterday showed.
Board directors shared the view that the trade friction has hit Taiwanese firms hard and fast, as seen by seven straight months of export declines before June.
Some firms moved high-end manufacturing back to Taiwan, while relocating lower-end production to Southeast Asia, they said.
The government has removed investment hurdles and rolled out incentives to lure Taiwanese capital from China and elsewhere, one director said.
So far this year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has approved 98 applications, with investment valued nearly NT$500 billion (US$16.03 billion).
As more products are manufactured locally rather than overseas, the domestic supply chain would grow and flourish, the director said.
Another director said the swelling of capital repatriation also has to do with the adoption by many countries of the Common Reporting Standard to combat tax evasion.
As some returning investment cases involve domestic bank lending, financial authorities should pay attention to how this would affect loanable funds in the local market, the director said.
One director said that last year’s property transactions recovered to 2013 levels, but the number of vacant units has continued to pick up over the past few years.
The pressure to reduce housing vacancies had been building as seen in the lukewarm presale market, the director said.
The recovery in housing prices and transactions looks more like a return to normal instead of a boom in property sales and value, the director said.
Another board director said that construction and mortgage loans have reached seven or eight-year highs, and new or existing home prices have inched up for several quarters in a row.
Commercial properties and industrial land have also seen an upsurge this year aided by returning capital, the director said.
The director called for close monitoring of the real-estate market and potential loan concentration so that regulators can respond quickly, if necessary, before expectations for home price appreciation take hold.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
RSS