■ TAIEX gains on phone stocks
Shares rose slightly yesterday as mobile phone stocks attracted buying on solid revenue figures for last month. The TAIEX gained 8.74 points, or 0.1 percent, to 6,149.88, on turnover of NT$64.22 billion (US$1.97 billion). Arima Communications Corp (華冠通訊), whose clients include Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd, rose by the daily maximum of 7 percent to NT$15.65 after the company said Wednesday its revenue for last month rose 72 percent from the same month last year to NT$2.03 billion (US$62.05 million).
Hopes for stronger handset shipment in the next few months also spurred strong buying in Compal Communications Inc (華寶通訊), Taiwan's second-largest handset maker by shipments. The stock rose 3.9 percent at NT$107.50.
■ BenQ secures EU approval
BenQ Corp (明基) secured EU antitrust approval to take over Siemens AG's unprofitable mobile-phone unit.
Siemens, Germany's largest engineering company, on June 7 said it will pull out of the mobile-phone industry after two decades and that BenQ will take over the business and its 7,000 employees. The acquisition will make BenQ the world's fifth-biggest handset maker.
"After the proposed merger BenQ will continue to face competition from strong, well-established competitors" in Europe such as Nokia Oyj, the European Commission, the 25-nation EU's antitrust regulator in Brussels, said.
■ NT dollar trades lower
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.103 to close at NT$32.746. Turnover was US$745.5 million, down from US$1.16 billion the previous day.
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登精密), the sole extreme ultraviolet pod supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), yesterday said it has trimmed its revenue growth target for this year as US tariffs are likely to depress customer demand and weigh on the whole supply chain. Gudeng’s remarks came after the US on Monday notified 14 countries, including Japan and South Korea, of new tariff rates that are set to take effect on Aug. 1. Taiwan is still negotiating for a rate lower than the 32 percent “reciprocal” tariffs announced by the US in April, which it later postponed to today. The
ELECTRONICS: Strong growth in cloud services and smart consumer electronics offset computing declines, helping the company to maintain sales momentum, Hon Hai said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Saturday announced that its sales for last month rose 10 percent year-on-year, driven by strong growth in cloud and networking products amid the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company, also known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), reported consolidated sales of NT$540.24 billion (US$18.67 billion) for the month, the highest ever for the period, and a 10.09 percent increase from a year earlier, although it was down 12.26 percent from the previous month. Hon Hai, which is Apple Inc’s primary iPhone assembler and makes servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, said its cloud
Video streaming giant Netflix is launching a talent cultivation program in Taiwan aimed at producing high-quality Mandarin content, the company announced in a press release on Thursday. Netflix Chinese language content head Maya Huang (黃怡玫) said that Netflix has long invested in the Taiwanese market, citing the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity launched last year as an example. The fund would continue to dedicate resources to discovering content with the potential to be developed into Chinese-language projects, she added. The financing for the new talent projects seeks to create an ecosystem for content creators and professional development programs, she said. The talent projects
APPRECIATION: The central bank stepped in to stabilize the NT dollar after a surge in foreign institutional investment, triggered by optimism about tariffs and US Fed policy Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, as the central bank intervened in the currency market to curb the New Taiwan dollar’s appreciation against the US dollar. Foreign exchange reserves increased by US$5.48 billion from May, reaching an all-time high of US$598.43 billion, the central bank said on Friday. While the central bank did not disclose the scale of its intervention, Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民) said that the currency market remained relatively stable until the middle of last month. However, a shift occurred following the US Federal Reserve’s signal of a
RSS