■ Profit-taking keeps lid on gains
Shares closed 0.30 percent higher yesterday but profit-taking kept a lid on intraday gains driven by another record Wall Street finish and the US Federal Reserve's comments that inflation does not seem to be a growing concern, dealers said.
With concerns about the US monetary policy out of the way for now, the bourse is likely to focus on a further string of quarterly corporate earnings, they said.
The TAIEX was up 20.95 points at 7,080.84, on turnover of NT$89.60 billion (US$2.69 billion).
Decliners led risers 573 to 498, with 207 stocks unchanged.
■ Fubon Financial revises profit
Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控) revised up its January-last month profit to NT$5.39 billion from an earlier stated NT$4.85 billion, the company said in a statement yesterday. The latest figure represented a 57 percent decline from a year earlier, when nine-month profit was NT$12.6 billion.
Fubon Financial attributed the profit decline to an increase of NT$8.8 billion in bad-loan provisions in the first nine months compared with a year earlier.
The negative impact of the bad loans will be gradually eased from the fourth quarter, and Fubon Financial will gradually return to normal profitability, it said.
Third-quarter net income fell to NT$1.74 billion, down 69 percent from NT$5.64 billion a year earlier, according to the company.
■ NT dollar rises
The New Taiwan dollar traded higher against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.051 to close at NT$33.265 on the Taipei Forex Inc. Turnover was US$753 million.
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
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
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).
RSS