■ Boom to continue
The boom in Taiwan's property market is expected to continue throughout the year on the back of the country's economic recovery and relatively low levels of interest rates, said Victor Chang (張欣民), a manager at Sinyi Realty Estate Inc (信義房屋) yesterday.
Taiwan's property market peaked in 1989 as the weighted index of the Taiwan Stock Exchange breached a record high of 12,000 points. Property prices hit the bottom in 2001, and since then prices have become firmer.
"But the upward trend could hardly be felt until the second half of 2003," Chang said.
In the Taipei area, the prices of second-hand houses have risen some 7.0 percent since 2001, according to Sinyi Realty's statistics.
Chang made the remarks after Cathay Life Insurance Co (國泰 人壽) beat rival Shinkong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) in acquiring a plot of public land for NT$8.2 billion yesterday.
■ IBM announces strategy
IBM Taiwan Corp's software group announced yesterday that this year's development strategy would evolve into specialty orientation by reshuffling its five original software brands.
"This is a move of most significance following IBM's decision to withdraw from software application domain and focus on the middleware realm in 1999," said Timothy Ding (丁瑞麟), IBM Tai-wan's software group executive.
The "middle ware" refers to IBM's five software brands -- DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere. The company's new strategy is to pay less attention on these brands but on their specialities -- such as business integration, business intelligence, content management, portal/on demand workplace, data center automation, development tool, pervasive computing, security, storage, Linux and competitive winback.
Among which, Linux is an important specialty as many governments have adopted the technology to build platform for their information infrastructure with IBM's help.
IBM Taiwan also won several government procurement projects under E-Tawian program to build paperless environment and establish the advanced information infrastructure in transportation, household registry and military service affairs, the company said.
■ China ready to compete
China Steel Corp (中鋼) said day that it will strive to produce superior products to counter increased competition from Chinese steel manufacturers.
China has often been referred to as the "world's factory for manufacturing" and its steel-producing sector has seen rapid increased growth in its production capacity.
Although China Steel in Taiwan is enjoying good profits at the moment, company officials acknowledge that world steel prices are bound to move toward more cutthroat competition and China Steel is expecting this to adversely affect profits, company officials said.
"We have to look for other ways to boost our revenues," the officials added.
China Steel is planning to increase research and development, the officials said, hoping that the high-value added products will find a niche in the ever-more competitive global market.
In addition, China Steel must also expand the production capacity of its higher quality goods, they said, as well as establish a marketing network for these products, especially in downstream industries. The company will also have to tap other markets, including China, in the future.
■ NT dollar holds steady
The New Taiwan dollar maintained its strength against its US counterpart, advancing NT$0.020 to close at NT$33.129 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$1.48 billion.
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