No plans to ease rules
The government has no plans to ease current restrictions on investment in China by Taiwanese chipmakers, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) said yesterday.
Shih made the remarks during a meeting with a group of opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators.
He was responding to a report in the Chinese-language United Daily News that the Ministry of Economic Affairs would allow Taiwanese chipmakers to move 12-inch wafer fabs to China from August and use 90-nanometer manufacturing technology in China.
Dismissing the report as speculation, Shih said the ministry had not discussed this issue.
The ministry would first have to work out a set of complementary measures before relaxing the investment restrictions, Shih added.
The government has only allowed chipmakers to set up fabs in China that produce 8-inch or smaller semiconductor wafers and to use 0.18-micron or larger processes in China.
Another Chunghwa dividend
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s biggest telecom company, yesterday said its board approved a plan to issue an additional NT$1.6 in cash per share in payout as part of its efforts to improve its financial structure.
To optimize the company’s financial structure, Chunghwa Telecom plans to cancel 1.91 billion outstanding shares and return the cash to shareholders.
The move will follow Chunghwa Telecom issuing 1.91 billion new common shares to pay a NT$2 dividend after issuing new shares to reduce its accumulated earnings, which aims to limit an increase in its outstanding shares.
Chunghwa Telecom has 9.6 billion outstanding shares and this will increase to 9.7 billion after issuing 139 million new common shares to pay a dividend based on last year’s earnings.
No tax rebates
The government is still in deficit even though its tax revenues have exceeded targets for the last four consecutive years, and was therefore not in a position to offer tax rebates, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement on Thursday.
The statement came in response to a proposal by the DPP that the government pay refunds to taxpayers given that it recorded a surplus over the last two years.
The ministry said the government had budget surpluses of NT$16.6 billion (US$546 million) and NT$79.6 billion in 2006 and last year respectively. However, the government was still in deficit for those years after special budgets were taken into account, the ministry said.
The government had an estimated deficit of NT$184.7 billion this year, while the amount of debt the government has yet to pay off has reached NT$3.9 trillion, the ministry said.
China’s reserves at US$1.8tn
China’s foreign reserves, already the world’s largest, rose to US$1.8 trillion at the end of last month but growth slowed, a government newspaper reported yesterday.
The reserves grew by US$40.3 billion last month, well below the April increase of US$75 billion, the China Securities Journal said, citing data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
The agency publicly announces its reserves only four times a year; the next report is due next month.
NT dollar down slightly
The NT dollar dropped against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, declining NT$0.005 to close at NT$30.388.
A total of US$1.221 billion changed hands during the day’s trading.
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