Shares gain 3 percent
Taiwanese shares closed up 3 percent yesterday near a six-month high, tracking Wall Street’s overnight gains, dealers said.
The weighted index surged 159.33 points to 5,473.78 on turnover of NT$148.17 billion (US$4.38 billion), the highest level since 5524.66 on Oct. 7.
Gainers outnumbered losers 1,548 to 525, while 105 shares remained unchanged.
Analysts expect the local market to continue the upward trend amid expectations for more economic stimulus plans at the G20 summit.
FSC approves securities rule
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday approved a regulation requiring all of the nation’s securities brokerages to disclose the salaries of their top executives.
Under the “fat-cat” regulation, domestic securities houses will be required to include the salaries of their board members, supervisors and top management, including presidents and vice presidents, in their annual financial reports.
The regulation also requires domestic investment trust firms that suffer losses for two consecutive years or whose board members have collateralized more than 50 percent of their stakes for bank loans to detail the salary information, the FSC said in a statement.
Bad credit ratio rises slightly
The bad-loan ratio for the nation’s credit and cash cards fluctuated slightly in February, figures released by the FSC showed.
Some 40 credit-card issuers averaged a 1.6 percent bad-loan ratio as the end of February, up 0.09 percentage points month-on-month.
No credit-card issuers had a bad-loan ratio above 3 percent except for Chinfon Commercial Bank (慶豐銀行), whose bad loans were sold off late last month.
Eighteen cash-card issuers averaged a 3.407 percent bad-loan ratio, representing a drop of 0.092 percentage points.
Chinfon, Union Bank of Taiwan (聯邦銀行) and the Development Bank of Singapore (星展銀行) had the highest bad-loan ratios at 12.064 percent, 6.459 percent and 6.255 percent respectively and have stopped issuing new cards.
FSC fines Citibank Taiwan
The FSC yesterday fined Citibank Taiwan NT$1 million fine for failing to seek approval before injecting NT$302 million into a car rental subsidiary previously invested in by the Bank of Overseas Chinese (華僑銀行), which Citibank acquired.
Most vouchers already spent
As of April 1, the nation’s stores had cashed NT$61.37 billion (US$1.81 billion) in consumer vouchers, or 70 percent of the amount distributed, the Ministry of Finance said in a statement yesterday.
The statement said citizens and qualifying residents had collected NT$83.73 billion in vouchers so far. The government has estimated that the vouchers will boost GDP by 0.66 percentage points this year.
NT dollar ‘relatively stable’
The New Taiwan dollar is “relatively stable,” the central bank said yesterday, after the local currency advanced the most this year as stocks rallied.
The local currency traded at NT$33.58 versus the greenback as of the 4pm close, Taipei Forex Inc said. Yesterday’s appreciation was the biggest since Dec. 18. It earlier touched NT$33.192, the strongest level since Jan. 14.
“The US dollar depreciated against major currencies today,” the central bank said in a faxed statement, adding the South Korean won had posted a bigger gain.
The won gained 3.4 percent, compared with a 0.8 percent gain in the NT dollar.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS