Holiday makes for thin trade
Share prices moved in thin trade yesterday as investors stayed on the sidelines, wary of the long weekend ahead for the Mid-Autumn Festival and potential volatility in global financial markets, dealers said.
The TAIEX closed up 62.2 points, or 0.82 percent, at 7,610.57, after fluctuating between 7,547.00 and 7,651.27, on turnover of NT$890.1 billion (US$3.04 billion), down from NT$98.91 billion the previous day.
August tax revenues up 20%
Tax revenues surged 19.9 percent from a year earlier to NT$116.3 billion last month, driving up revenues in the first eight months of the year to NT$1.184 trillion, up 10.7 percent year-on-year, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳), deputy director of the ministry’s statistics department, attributed last month’s growth to a pickup in income tax revenue, which rose 39.4 percent year-on-year to NT$59.8 billion.
In the first eight months of the year, sales tax revenue rose to a record-high of NT$178.6 billion, up 3.4 percent from a year earlier. Revenue from housing and vehicle license taxes also reached historical highs, the ministry said.
Ministry sets industry targets
The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday set a goal to promote Taiwan’s smart handheld device industry, aiming to increase its output to NT$1.28 trillion by 2015.
The ministry said it also expected enterprises to inject investments of more than NT$20 billion and create jobs of 150,000 by 2015, it said in a statement.
The ministry set up a task force to promote the smart handheld device industry at the beginning of this year and convened its second committee meeting yesterday.
The task force would garner feedback from academics within the next two months, before presenting a strategic proposal to the Executive Yuan on how to prioritize the establishment of a complete supply chain, especially in the components sector, as well as solve issues such as talent shortage, the ministry said.
Bank SinoPac fined
The Financial Supervisory Commission yesterday fined Bank SinoPac (永豐銀行), a banking subsidiary of SinoPac Holdings Co (永豐金控), NT$2 million for violating confidentiality rules, the commission said in a statement.
The lender failed to secure consent from customers before passing their information to its telemarketing staff to pitch insurance products, the commission said.
No illegal profits: central bank
The central bank yesterday rebutted allegations that it “harvested illegal profits” by issuing commemorative banknotes.
The bank on Thursday issued a total of 800,000 sets of uncut commemorative NT$100 currency sheets, with each sheet comprising three commemorative NT$100 banknotes.
The Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行) was appointed to deal with the exchange of the commemorative notes and the sale of the uncut sheets, each of which cost NT$500, the central bank said.
The central bank dismissed Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Huang Wei-cher’s (黃偉哲) accusation that it made “NT$400 million out of the sale,” saying it only made NT$55 per sale.
“All the profit, totaling only NT$44 million, will be channeled into the national coffers,” the bank said.
NT dollar falls further
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday continued to retreat against the US dollar, falling NT$0.071 to close at NT$29.221 on turnover of US$784 million.
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