The nation’s net foreign fund outflow totaled US$3.89 billion last month, the first outflow over the past six months, as foreign institutional investors continued to sell local shares amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) data showed.
Foreign institutional investors sold a net NT$129.24 billion (US$4.3 billion) of shares in the local equity market last month, higher than the NT$36.46 billion sold in January, the data showed.
Foreign investors dumped a net NT$129.8 billion of local shares of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, while they purchased a net NT$627 million on the Taipei Exchange, lower than the NT$6.53 billion bought a month earlier, the data showed.
“That reflected weak confidence among foreign institutional investors amid the ongoing outbreak. They were concerned with local companies’ profitability, with the outbreak disrupting supply chains and delaying companies’ resumption of operations,” a commission official surnamed Wu (吳) told the Taipei Times.
The benchmark TAIEX recovered its previous loss in the middle of February, but steadily went down with the escalating outbreak, the TWSE data showed.
Equity markets in neighboring countries also witnessed a retreat.
Due to the sell-off, the value of foreign institutional investors’ equity assets accounted for 40.69 percent of total last month, down from 41.23 percent a month earlier, Wu said.
However, the commission was not concerned about last month’s net outflow, as the amount was not particularly big, Wu said.
“The movement of foreign funds is volatile in Taiwan, with net inflow and outflow. We already saw net inflow of foreign funds earlier this week,” Wu said.
Last month’s difference between the amount of fund outflow and the amount of foreign institutional investors’ selling could be because some investors did not immediately move their funds out of Taiwan, Wu said.
Those investors might plan to buy local stocks again in the near term or simply wait for the exchange rate of the New Taiwan dollar against the US dollar to strengthen, which would help investors earn more money when converting the local currency to the greenback, Wu said.
Chinese institutional investors reported a net fund outflow of US$3.7 million after selling a net NT$316 million in local shares last month, the commission’s data showed.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts