Wed, Sep 08, 2004 page11

• Business Briefs

  • AGENCIES
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  ■ Beijing policy hurts CMC profits

  China Motor Corp (中華汽車), Taiwan's biggest carmaker, said it will miss its profit target for this year because China's moves to slow the growth pace of its economy has caused vehicles sales to plunge. "It's falling because of the slowdown in China's economy, hurting our car sales," company president Huang Wen-cheng (黃文成) said in Taipei. "The impact of China's tightening policy is far greater than we expected," Huang said. China Motor's vehicle sales, including those of the Lioncel compact cars, may fall by 10 percent to 80,000 units this year in China, causing the Taipei-based carmaker to miss its 2004 sales target by almost a third. The carmaker said it won't be able to meet the NT$7 billion (US$206.5 million) of pretax profit it said it would earn this year. China Motor sold about 50,000 cars in China in the first eight months, Huang said. China Motor has been selling fewer cars in the world's third-largest vehicle market, as total sales slowed from last year's 76 percent expansion and from the 50 percent growth in 2002. Total car sales may grow by a quarter this year, according to China's government forecasts. China Motor's profit will decline by less than 20 percent from its previous forecast, a threshold that will compel the company to file a disclosure with the Taiwan Stock Exchange to revise its profit forecast, company spokesman Hsu Li-min (許利民) said.

  ■ Asia tops for broadband: ITU

  Asia is home to four of the top seven countries for high-speed Internet usage as companies such as auctioneer Yahoo Japan Corp and KT Corp, South Korea's leading access provider, sign up more users, a report said. South Korea is the world's leader, with 23.3 subscribers of high-speed Internet access per 100 inhabitants, according to the International Telecommunication Union report. Hong Kong is second, with 18 out of 100 people, while Taiwan ranks fifth and Japan seventh. In the three years ended 2003, the number of high-speed Internet subscribers across Asia rose 90 percent annually to 42 million, said the group's study, which was released at a conference in Busan, South Korea. In terms of mobile phones, the number of subscribers rose an average of 31 percent per year between 2000 and 2003 to 560 million, the report said, putting Asia ahead of North America as the world's largest market.

  There is room for further growth because some 16 out of 100 people in Asia have cell phones, compared with 52 in Europe and 35 in the Americas, the report said.

  ■ Chipmakers may boost profits

  Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) and Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), Taiwan's lar-gest makers of memory chips, may lift their profits later this year with improvements in their production technology, a Taipei-based business daily said, without saying where it obtained the information. The companies have cut costs by a fifth by increasing output of chips made with smaller gaps between transistors, the report said. Semiconductor makers can cut costs by shrinking the size of their chips and fitting more on a silicon wafer. Nanya and Powerchip have shifted about 60 percent of their production to 0.11-micron technology, the report said.

  ■ NT dollar higher

  The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded higher against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.004 to close at NT$33.929 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$466.5 million.
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