Share prices closed down 1.02 percent yesterday as investors took profit from early gains ahead of the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, dealers said.
The TAIEX fell 77.22 points to close at the day’s low of 7,423.57, off a high of 7,584.81. Turnover was NT$84.99 billion (US$2.63 billion).
The market opened 0.72 percent higher amid optimism over the economic outlook after Taiwan and China sign the trade pact. However, selling emerged later in the session, eroding the early gains as investors rushed to pocket recent profits, dealers said.
The food sector encountered the heaviest pressure, falling 2 percent. The financial sector closed down 1.8 percent, while the textile, plastic and chemical sector and the pulp and paper sector both fell 1.2 percent.
Cement shares dropped 1 percent, machinery and electronics stocks lost 0.7 percent and the construction sector shed 0.4 percent.
Foodmaker Uni-President Enterprises (統一企業) fell 1.52 percent to NT$35.55 and its competitor, AGV Products Corp (愛之味), dropped 2 percent to NT$12.25.
“While many investors have faith in the long term economic outlook after the signing of the ECFA with China, it was time for them to adjust their portfolios,” TLG Asset Management (台壽保投信) analyst Arch Shih (施博元) said.
“The reversal of the early gains was no surprise as the positive aspects of the trade pact have mostly been digested,” Shih said.
Taiwan and China signed the ECFA yesterday afternoon, after both sides finalized their lists of industries that would be eligible for tariff waivers and easy market access.
Shih said selling focused on stocks that have close business ties with China, as they have recently risen on high hopes that their bottom lines would be boosted by increasing cross-strait economic exchanges.
Among the financial stocks that scored the highest gains on Monday on hopes of easier market access to China, Hua Nan Financial yesterday fell 3.33 percent to NT$18.85 and Cathay Financial Holding Co (華南金控) dropped 2.2 percent to NT$49.
Shih said select high-tech stocks appeared resilient to the weakness of the broader market.
“It seems that funds are shifting back to the high-tech sector from old economy stocks. This sector may support the broader market in the short term,” he said.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
RSS