TAIEX drops on recession fears
The TAIEX fell 1.06 percent yesterday, reversing earlier gains, as big-cap financial stocks fell amid concern over a global recession.
The benchmark index shed 82.07 points to close at 7,637.02, after moving between 7,847.99 and 7,853.53 on turnover of NT$139.768 billion (US$4.82 billion).
A total of 2,407 stocks closed up, 2,309 closed down and 489 were unchanged, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
All sectors ended lower, with cement posting the biggest drop at 2.2 percent, data showed.
Hon Hai scouts land for dorm
Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) is looking for land to build a dormitory for the 3,000 new employees it plans to recruit for a planned cloud computing center in Greater Kaohsiung, a municipal official said on Thursday.
Hon Hai is looking to offer each of its employees a 60 ping (198m2) home, said Lan Chien-chang (藍健菖), chief of Greater Kaohsiung’s Economic Development Bureau.
It has already requested that dormitory houses be offered first to the 300 Hon Hai engineers who currently work at the Kaohsiung Software Technology Park, where the cloud computing center will be built, Lan said.
The municipal government has already provided several plots of land for Hon Hai to choose from.
Powerchip gets debt extension
PC chipmaker Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) received agreement from creditor banks to extend medium to long-term credit by six months and debt repayments by the same period, the company said in a statement to the stock exchange yesterday.
Solargiga plans bond issue
Solar-energy parts maker Solargiga Energy Holdings Ltd (陽光能源) plans to sell up to 300 million yuan of bonds in Hong Kong, while New Focus Auto Tech Holdings Ltd (新焦點汽車) sold 200 million yuan of two-year 3.75 percent notes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
SinoPac Securities (Asia) Ltd has been hired to arrange the Solargiga deal, the person said, asking not to be identified as details are private.
Comtec delays TDR plans
Comtec Solar Systems Group Ltd (卡姆丹克太陽能系統集團) postponed its planned sale and listing of Taiwan depositary receipts (TDR) because of “ongoing volatility in the global financial markets” and because it does not need funds immediately, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday.
Meanwhile, Sumpo Food Holdings Ltd (森寶食品控股), a Hong Kong-listed chicken meat product supplier, on Thursday filed for a TDR issue on Taiwan’s stock exchange.
7-Eleven offers laundry service
President Chain Store Corp (統一超商), the operator of the nation’s largest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven, this week added a laundry service to serve customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
President Chain said convenience stores in Japan introduced such a service nine years ago to great fanfare, with its market seeing 30 percent growth every year. This inspired President Chain to move into Taiwan’s NT$10 billion laundry market, with the company saying its standard operating procedure would only take four days to clean and deliver customers’ laundry.
The service is currently only available at 7-Eleven stores in Taipei, New Taipei City (新北市) and Keelung.
NT dollar gains ground
The New Taiwan dollar rose against the US dollar yesterday, adding NT$0.051 to close at NT$29.009, on turnover of US$1.155 billion.
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
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
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
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