Government-approved foreign direct investment (FDI) rose 9.37 percent to US$7.88 billion in the first nine months of this year from a year earlier, mainly because of the effects of the US-China trade dispute, the Investment Commission said yesterday.
Last month alone, approved FDI in Taiwan was about US$1.36 billion, a year-on-year rise of 111 percent, mainly on the back of a US$450 million investment in a Yunlin County offshore wind farm construction and operation project by Yunneng Wind Power Co Ltd (允能風力發電), the commission said.
From January to last month, the electronic components sector had the largest approved FDI of US$2.67 billion, followed by the financial and insurance sector (US$1.5 billion), the machinery equipment manufacturing sector (US$750 million), the retail and wholesale sector (US$640 million) and the electricity and gas supply sector (US$470 million), commission data showed.
Approved Chinese investment in Taiwan in the nine-month period totaled US$87.30 million, down 54.63 percent from a year earlier, the commission said.
At the same time, the value of approved China-bound investment in the first nine months was US$2.82 billion, down 56.9 percent from a year earlier, mainly due to the trade dispute, which has prompted some Taiwanese companies based in China to accelerate their plans to return home.
The value of outbound investments, excluding to China, reached about US$5.45 billion, down 36.82 percent from the same period last year, the commission said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by