Following the planned inking of a trade pact with China, the nation’s residential property market is poised to embrace international buyers, which has provided a boost to property prices including for luxury homes, realtors said yesterday.
The inflow of capital from China has greatly accelerated to total US$34.82 million in the first four months of this year, compared with US$37.49 million for the whole of last year, Jeffrey Huang (黃增福), an assistant manager at Evertrust Rehouse Co’s (永慶房屋) research and development department, told a media briefing yesterday, citing statistics from the Investment Commission.
Huang also said properties in Taiwan have become more attractive than their counterparts in Hong Kong and Singapore, given their price valuation.
In Taipei City, a total of 5,979 properties changed hands last month, representing a 20 percent growth year-on-year and was the second-highest monthly volume this year after 6,395 transactions in January, said Huang, citing the city government’s latest statistics.
Among the city’s 12 districts, the number of property transactions in Wanhua District (萬華) saw the biggest jump — 55 percent — month-on-month last month, followed by a 32.7 percent increase in Nangang District (南港) and 22 percent in Xinyi District (信義), the government’s data showed.
Despite market concerns about a property price correction in the second half of the year, Credit Suisse analyst Sidney Yeh (葉昌明) said in a client note yesterday that prices in Taipei’s pre-sale market will hold up well, thanks to tight supply in the primary market.
“We anticipate estate prices to be flattish in the second half of the year, following an 8 percent to 10 percent increase in the first half,” Yeh said, citing a 20 percent drop in new supply in the first half from the 2005 to 2008 average.
Meanwhile, Chinese-language Housing Monthly’s estimates showed that the city’s 12 luxury housing projects have averaged a rise of between 21 percent and 150 percent compared with closing prices between 1998 and last year.
For example, the unit price at the luxury project on Minshui Road by JUT Land Development Group (忠泰建設) has jumped by 150 percent from NT$600,000 (US$18,554) per ping in 2000 to NT$1.5 million now, followed by a 146 percent hike in the unit price of another project on Xinyi Road by Fubon Land Development Co (富邦建設), which currently averages NT$1.8 million per ping, it said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY KEVIN CHEN
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS