TAIEX rises 1.32 percent
Taiwanese shares closed up 1.32 percent yesterday, tracking gains on Wall Street and regional markets, dealers said.
The TAIEX index rose 98.07 points to 7,536.05 on turnover of NT$146.02 billion (US$4.57 billion).
Gainers led losers by 1,783 to 748 with 238 stocks unchanged.
The market rose on gains in Wall Street and Asian bourses as well as a stronger local currency against the US dollar, Capital Securities trader Diana Wu said.
“Some are concerned about the impact of the rising Taiwan dollar on technology companies, but other currencies ... are also rising, so it may not necessarily hurt Taiwan’s competitiveness,” she said.
CPC may use various currencies
State-run CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said it was studying whether to use a basket of currencies to pay for crude oil purchases.
“Our finance department is studying where to use a variety of currencies, including the yen, the euro and the dollar, for crude oil trade, compared with only the dollar now,” CPC vice president Lin Maw-wen (林茂文) said in a telephone interview yesterday. “Our purchases are relatively small, so we’ll just follow the trend.”
Criticism of the US dollar’s role as the world’s main reserve currency has grown in the wake of the global financial crisis. Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), CPC’s smaller rival, has been using euros and yen to pay for crude oil purchases from Iran, Lin Keh-yen (林克彥), a spokesman for the Taiwanese refiner, said by telephone.
THSRC holiday volume rises
Taiwan High Speed Rail Co (THSRC, 台灣高鐵) said in a statement yesterday that passenger volume rose 20 percent during the Mid-Autumn Festival between last Friday and Monday from last year.
THSRC added 29 trains over the holiday period to carry an extra 71,000 passengers, the statement said, adding that all trains arrived at their destinations on time.
Passengers totaled more than 430,000 during the four days with 539 trains in service, the statement said, putting the load factor at 53.05 percent, up 5.5 percentage points from last year.
The company encouraged passengers to make reservations, saying doing so online can get a 5 percent discount.
WiMAX trial run in Hsinchu
Local WiMAX license holder Global Mobile Corp (全球一動) introduced on Monday its first WiMAX trial-run service in Hsinchu, with an official commercial launch in January at the latest.
The company said 70 percent of the base station’s deployment was completed.
At present, it covers more than 70 percent of the population there and it aims to extend the coverage to 95 percent before the commercial rollout.
The company said it will launch more exciting applications to attract subscribers, in addition to the main selling point of fast Internet connection.
Companies such as Vmax Telecom Co (威邁思), Vee Telecom Multimedia Co (威達超舜) and Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信), the nation’s No. 3 mobile carrier, are also expected to launch WiMAX services by the end of the year or early next year.
NT dollar gains on greenback
The NT dollar gained ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, rising NT$0.075 to close at NT$32.180.
A total of US$1.39 billion changed hands during the day’s trading.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
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