The Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) yesterday said the nation’s economy would bottom out in the first quarter of next year, after dropping its GDP growth forecast by 1.06 percentage points to 4.64 percent for this year.
In July, the Taipei-based institute estimated a 5.7 percent economic growth rate for Taiwan this year.
“The recent rising uncertainties in the global economy weakened Taiwan’s export sector in the third quarter amid weak demand, dragging down local companies’ investments and consumers’ confidence,” TIER president David Hong (洪德生) told an economics conference.
The institute revised its growth forecasts for private consumption and private investment for this year to 3.48 percent and 2.48 percent respectively, compared with the 3.82 percent and 3.26 percent it previously estimated, TIER said in a report.
The output sector is expected to expand 6.03 percent this year, with the input sector growing 2.53 percent, the report said.
Next year, the institute said, the economy would grow 4.22 percent.
TIER said the economy would expand by 2.36 percent in the first quarter of next year, the lowest quarterly increase of the year, after growing 4.32 percent this quarter.
However, Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫), the institute’s vice president, said growing momentum in the economy may see it return to a more normal track in the second half of next year, with the technology sector leading the rebound.
“The latest data from domestic technology companies has shown some signs of bottoming, such as gradually digested inventory,” Kung said.
A similar trend was seen in the institute’s latest survey on the business climate in the manufacturing sector, which showed an overall “green” light — indicating steady sentiment — for next year, compared with a “yellow-blue” light, a sign of weak sentiment, flashing for this year, said Gordon Sun (孫明德), deputy director of the institute’s macroeconomic forecasting center.
The survey found that 34.3 percent of respondents felt bullish about business sentiment for next year, 43.8 percent thought it would be flat and 29.5 percent felt it would be bearish, Sun said.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
RSS