■ Profit-taking depresses shares
Share prices closed 0.33 percent lower yesterday as an initial Wall Street-driven advance lost momentum in the face of profit-taking and weakness in financial stocks, dealers said. They said the financial sector lost ground following a report that lawmakers have agreed to a ceiling on interest rates for debt taken on by holders of credit and cash cards.
The TAIEX dropped 21 points to end at 6,329.52, on turnover of NT$112.33 billion (US$3.36 billion). The New Taiwan dollar declined against its US counterpart on the Taipei foreign exchange market, down NT$0.024 to end the day at NT$33.485. Turnover was US$861 million.
■ DGBAS releases job figures
A total of 841,000 job openings were available at government-run employment agencies in the first 10 months of the year, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) announced on Tuesday. With the number of job seekers totaling 487,000 during that period, this translates into 1.7 jobs per person. The DGBAS report shows that the number of employers and job seekers registering with government-run employment agencies increased by 7.5 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively, compared with the same period of last year. However, the jobs available to each job seeker was lower than the 1.8 during the year-earlier period.
Most of the openings -- 374,000 -- were for workers with a senior-high school diploma. A total of 403,177 job seekers were hired from January to October, up 78.6 percent from the same period of last year, according to the bureau's statistics.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
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