TAIEX up a cautious 0.2 percent
Share prices closed 0.2 percent higher yesterday, steadying after a week of heavy losses as investors rotated into non-tech industrial and financial stocks, dealers said.
They said the market may have hit or is approaching the bottom, as investors appear to have done most of their selling, opening up the possibility of a rebound next month after the close of the first quarter.
The TAIEX added 12.02 points to close at 6,376.62, on turnover of NT$76.86 billion (US$2.35 billion). Gainers led decliners 448 to 436, with 182 stocks unchanged.
No delays, THSRC says
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC, 台灣高鐵), contractor of the nation's first bullet train, yesterday said it would inaugurate its full-line service as scheduled at the end of October, a public relations official said.
THSRC made the remarks in response to a Japanese-language Yukanfuji report, which cited sources in Taiwan and Japan as saying that the high-speed rail will only run from Banciao (板橋) in Taipei County to Kaohsiung City by the end of October, rather than from the Taipei Railway Station to Kaohsiung due to delays in communication and electrical system installations around the stations.
The report also said that the Taipei-Banciao segment will not start operating until the eve of the next Lunar New Year.
THSRC said it had completed 93.49 percent of the project at the end of January and will deliver the whole project by October.
Money supply growth slows
Money supply growth slowed last month for the first time in three months due to a decrease in net capital inflows, weak growth in bank loans and Lunar New Year distortions, the Central Bank of China said.
M2, the broadest measure of the nation's money supply, rose 6.5 percent last month from a year ago after gaining 7.2 percent in January, the Bank said in a statement yesterday.
M1A, which tracks net currency in circulation plus checking accounts and passbook deposits, expanded 6.0 percent last month after increasing 9.9 percent in January, the Bank said.
M1B, which excludes time deposits and foreign-currency deposits included in M2, rose 5.6 percent last month, after expanding 8.4 percent the previous month.
China investments approved
The Investment Commission yesterday said it approved 13 China-bound investment plans worth US$333.01 million this week, including those by Asustek Com-puter Inc (華碩電腦) and AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電).
Asustek, a leading notebook computer and mobile communications manufacturer, was given the green light on Thursday to invest US$50 million to set up a wholly owned unit, North Tek (Shanghai) (恭碩科技), to manufacture cellphone related products, the commission said.
The commission also approved the application by flat-panel display maker AUO to invest US$50 million in Xiamen and US$30 million in Suzhou to manufacture backlight modules and other components for flat-panel display use.
In the first two months of this year, the commission approved a total of US$913 million in China investment applications, up 31.9 percent from a year earlier.
The commission said it also approved on Thursday five applications for inbound investments totaling US$830.27 million, pushing the combined authorized value so far this year to US$1.79 billion.
NT$ dollar falls further
The New Taiwan dollar continued to lose ground against the US dollar on the Taipei foreign exchange market yesterday, sliding NT$0.091 to close at NT$32.669.
Turnover was US$951 million.
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
‘IT HURTS TOO MUCH’: After talks between Blizzard and NetEase over their contract broke down, servers hosting Blizzard’s games in China were shut down Millions of Chinese gamers have lost access to World of Warcraft after a furious dispute between US title owner Activision Blizzard Inc and NetEase Inc (網易), its longtime local partner in the world’s biggest gaming market. Devotees of the popular game took to social media networks to bemoan the loss, with one posting an image of a failed connection message accompanied by crying emojis. “It really hurts my heart,” one wrote. “It hurts, it hurts too much,” another said. Massively popular worldwide, particularly in the 2000s, World of Warcraft — often abbreviated as WoW — is an online multiplayer role-playing game set in
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday accused Alphabet Inc’s Google of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful Internet firms. The US government said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12 percent of Google’s revenues in 2021, but also plays a vital role in the search engine and cloud company’s overall sales. “Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the
RSS