Wall Street leads TAIEX higher
Share prices closed 1.63 percent higher yesterday after a strong showing on Wall Street overnight as a euro rebound against the US dollar gave investors at home and abroad some relief from concerns over debt problems in the eurozone, according to dealers.
The TAIEX rose 117.72 points to 7,299.49 after moving between 7,273.70 and 7,321.60, on turnover of NT$86.96 billion (US$2.68 billion).
The market opened 1.69 percent higher as investors hailed the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s comeback to above the key 10,000-point level overnight, and the momentum continued throughout the session, led by financial stocks, dealers said.
A total of 2,401 stocks closed higher and 677 ended the day down, with 276 remaining unchanged.
Acer sales up 36.38 percent
Acer Inc (宏碁), the world’s largest notebook-computer vendor, on Thursday posted NT$50.49 billion in sales for last month, an increase of 36.38 percent from April and up 45.29 percent from a year earlier.
However, an analyst with a regional brokerage firm said that Acer posted a 17 percent decline in April from March after the European debt crisis surfaced.
“Acer’s performance in April and May was not consistent. We need more sales figures to determine whether Acer will be able to weather the weakness of the euro,” said the analyst, who requested anonymity.
The analyst added that she suspected Acer’s figure for last month came after the company delayed deliveries from April to last month.
Executives buy luxury homes
With Taipei Songshan Airport expected to launch direct flights to Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport, Taiwanese businesspeople operating in China accounted for nearly 30 percent of all Taipei luxury home sales last month, a local real-estate agent said yesterday.
Evertrust Rehouse Group (永慶房仲集團) said that, among buyers of luxury homes last month, China-based Taiwanese businesspeople accounted for 27.4 percent of sales, compared with 9.5 percent in January.
The real-estate company defined luxury homes as those sold at a minimum of NT$300,000 (US$9,270) per square meter, or NT$1 million per ping.
Jeffrey Huang (黃增福), assistant manager of Evertrust’s research department, said statistics showed that many Taiwanese have business-travel needs across the Taiwan Strait, so direct flights between Songshan and Hongqiao sharply increase their willingness to buy houses in Taiwan.
Marketing guru set to visit
Don Edward Schultz, often referred to as “the father of integrated marketing,” is scheduled to deliver a lecture in Taiwan later this month to help local companies create world-class branding.
Taiwanese enterprises have responded enthusiastically to the news, with nearly 700 company representatives registering to attend the June 29 lecture, which is being sponsored by the Bureau of Foreign Trade.
The companies include Giant Manufacturing Co (巨大), Namchow Group (南僑), D-Link Corp (友訊), BenQ Corp (明基) and ZyXEL Communications Corp (合勤), all of which are keen to build their brands, already famous around the world, into multinational-level status.
Schultz lectures and consults for business groups and serves as a visiting professor at universities in Australia, Britain and China.
NT dollar gains ground
The New Taiwan dollar gained ground against the US dollar yesterday, rising NT$0.051 to close at NT$32.439. Turnover totaled US$906 million.
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