Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) resumed trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday after completing a capital reduction, with shares rising 2.66 percent for the day. The benchmark TAIEX dropped 1.48 percent.
Chunghwa Telecom, the nation’s largest telecom operator in terms of assets, suspended trading of its shares from March 3 until Thursday on the main bourse, as the company cut its capital by 16.5 percent to reward shareholders with higher earnings per share.
To strengthen its financial structure, Chunghwa Telecom’s board decided on Dec. 26 last year to cut the firm’s capital by NT$19.18 billion (US$567 million) to NT$96.97 billion.
Via the capital reduction, which transferred batches of 1,000 old shares into 835.32 new common shares, Chunghwa Telecom would return NT$1.65 in cash per share to shareholders, according to the company’s earlier stock exchange filing.
The price of the company’s new stock was quoted at NT$63.75 when trading opened and soon hit its upper limit at NT$68.2 in early-morning trading, before pulling back to close at NT$65.50, Taiwan Stock Exchange data show. The shares ended at NT$54.90 on March 2.
The 2.66 percent increase in the share price yesterday tracked gains on the main bourse over the past two weeks, SinoPac Securities Corp (永豐金證券) said in a client note yesterday. The TAIEX rose 13.78 percent between March 3 and Thursday, the stock exchange’s tallies show.
But SinoPac said it was still cautious about the stock’s limited upside momentum in the near term, given its higher price-earnings ratio.
The brokerage offered a “hold” recommendation on the stock, the note showed.
UBS AG also yesterday cut its rating on Chunghwa to “neutral” from “buy,” on concerns that the stock might struggle to make substantial gains in the near term.
But Chunghwa earned an “outperform” rating at Credit Suisse, as the foreign brokerage believes the Taiwanese telecom operator may initiate another capital reduction, or a cut of 10 percent, to further benefit its shareholders, it said in an investment note.
Thus far, Chunghwa has not disclosed whether it would carry out another capital reduction exercise.
SinoPac Securities said in its note that Chunghwa had ample cash in hand, estimated at about NT$80 billion, and its board may decide by the end of next month whether to implement another capital reduction plan.
“High cash yields and capital reduction remain the near-term catalysts,” SinoPac said in the note.
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
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
RSS