Bad loan ratio unchanged
The nation’s average non-performing loan ratio among local banks was 1.53 percent at the end of last month, little changed from the previous month’s level, the Financial Supervisory Commission said yesterday.
The commission said the 37 local banks had outstanding loans totaling NT$18.46 trillion (US$563 million), up NT$183 billion from the end of August.
Bad loans were NT$281.8 billion, up NT$1.6 billion from the previous month, the commission said in a statement.
Refiner’s profit plummets
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), Taiwan’s only publicly traded oil refiner, posted the biggest decline in quarterly profit in more than two years after falling prices cut inventory values and a global economic slowdown reduced demand for its products.
Net income fell 30 percent, the biggest drop since the first quarter of 2006, to NT$16 billion (US$488 million) in the three months ended Sept. 30, according to calculations made by Bloomberg News based on the nine-month results announced yesterday. That figure beat the median estimate of NT$13.7 billion in a survey of five analysts.
Third-quarter sales rose 36 percent from a year earlier to NT$255.2 billion, after a 65 percent gain in the previous three months, monthly filings to the stock exchange show.
Nine-month net income fell 11 percent to NT$45.6 billion, the company said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.
MediaTek’s Q3 profit drops
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest supplier of chips for DVD players and handsets, said yesterday its third-quarter net profit fell 39 percent year-on-year to NT$7.18 billion (US$219.5 million).
The company expects its fourth-quarter revenue to fall by between 9 percent and 16 percent from NT$28.05 billion in the third quarter because of seasonal factors.
MediaTek said in a teleconference that its fourth-quarter gross margin may be similar to the third quarter’s 54.3 percent.
Motorola posts hefty loss
Motorola Inc says it had a hefty loss in the third quarter owing to the continued troubles of its cellphone division and the postponing of a planned spin-off of the unit, originally scheduled for the third quarter of next year.
The maker of communications gear said yesterday it lost US$397 million, or US$0.18 per share, in the July-September period. That contrasts with a profit of US$60 million, or US$0.03 per share, a year ago.
It says sales fell 15 percent to US$7.48 billion.
The loss included a net US$0.23 of charges, mostly for restructuring costs. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had on average expected the company to earn US$0.02 per share on revenue of US$7.82 billion.
Android games unveiled
Videogame titan Electronic Arts on Wednesday unveiled titles tailored for play on freshly launched “Google phones” running on Android open-source software.
Globally popular Tetris is available for the first of what is expected to be an array of mobile telephones based on a free, open software platform created by the Google-led Open Handset Alliance.
US telecom carrier T-Mobile last week began selling G1 smart phones made by Taiwan-based HTC Corp (宏達電).
NT dollar ‘relatively stable’
The New Taiwan dollar “is relatively stable,” the central bank said after the currency rose the most in eight years.
The NT dollar gained 1.5 percent to close at NT$32.799 against the US dollar, the steepest advance since January 2000, Taipei Forex Inc said. It earlier strengthened as much as 1.8 percent to NT$32.713.
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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).
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