Spain bailout lifts TAIEX
The TAIEX rose 1.72 percent yesterday, led by electronics stocks, after eurozone countries agreed to lend Spain up to US$125 billion to shore up its teetering banks.
The weighted index ranged between a high of 7,137.98 and a low of 7,081.72 before closing up 120.58 points at 7,120.23 on turnover of NT$65.21 billion (US$2.18 billion).
A total of 2,612 stocks closed up and 1,378 finished down, while 332 remained unchanged.
All of the market’s eight major stock categories closed up, with the financial sector netting the highest gain at 1.94 percent.
Scandal sees ASE shares fall
Shares in Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (ASE, 日月光), the world’s largest chip packager, dropped 1.7 percent to NT$25.60, the lowest close since Jan. 2, after company employees and their family members were questioned over the weekend for their alleged involvement in insider trading during ASE’s 2009 takeover of Universal Scientific Industrial Co (環隆電氣).
The Greater Kaohsiung-based company said on Saturday in an exchange filing that the investigation was not related to company operations and it had no knowledge of any alleged illegal activities.
Yageo sales up in China, EU
Taiwanese passive components service provider Yageo Corp (國巨) yesterday reported that consolidated sales rose 2.6 percent to NT$2.18 billion last month from April, but were down 0.9 percent from the same period a year ago.
The company’s accumulated sales in the first five months dropped 11.6 percent to NT$9.87 billion from NT$11.16 billion in the same period last year.
Yageo said sales increased in the Greater China region and in Europe last month from April, but slowed in the North American and Asia-Pacific regions.
Taiwan-Vietnam trade summit
A seminar on Taiwan-Vietnam bilateral trade ties will be held on June 26 in an effort to boost investment in Vietnam.
Taiwanese investments in Vietnam have fallen in recent years due to sluggish global demand and changes in Vietnam’s investment climate, according to the Chung-hua Institution for Economic Research, organizer of the seminar.
Taiwan remains the biggest importer of Vietnamese workers in the world and is also the third-largest economy that makes direct investments in Vietnam.
Science park expansion passed
The Council for Economic Planning and Development yesterday approved an expansion for the Central Taiwan Science Park project (中部科學園區) in Greater Taichung.
Development costs for the project, which is expected to be completed in 2015, would total NT$6.73 billion (US$224.9 million), the council said.
The expansion would create 7,000 jobs, with total annual output value expected to reach NT$200 billion, the council said.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), the world’s top contract chipmaker, is investing NT$400 billion to construct an 18-inch wafer fab at the park in 2014, a science park official added.
Yang Ming launches new ship
Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp (陽明海運), the nation’s second-largest container shipper in terms of fleet scale, yesterday said a new vessel is scheduled to begin service on Wednesday next week.
YM Uniformity (結明輪), an 8,626 twenty-foot-equivalent units (TEUs) full-container vessel built by CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台灣國際造船), was delivered yesterday.
The vessel will be deployed on Yang Ming’s Asia-North European route, along with three other new 8,600-TEU container ships.
NT dollar up against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar rose against the US dollar yesterday, adding NT$0.056 to close at NT$29.92.
Turnover totaled US$671 million during the trading session.
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
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