New housing loans from five leading banks nationwide last month reached their lowest levels since February, as many home buyers rushed to complete real-estate transactions in July to avoid the government’s new price-registration policy, the central bank said yesterday.
However, the average interest rate of new house-purchasing loans from the five leading banks reached 1.903 percent last month, the highest level since January 2009, an indication the government has been continuing to cool down the speculations in the house market, central bank data showed.
The banks — Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行), Taiwan Cooperative Bank (合作金庫銀行), Land Bank of Taiwan (土地銀行), Hua Nan Commercial Bank (華南商業銀行) and First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) — made NT$45.78 billion (US$1.55 billion) in new housing loans last month, the central bank said in its monthly statement.
The NT$45.78 billion in loans was NT$9.95 billion lower than the NT$55.73 billion posted in June, the bank said.
“Many people rushed to finish their real-estate transactions before Aug. 1 to avoid registration for real-estate transaction prices,” Chen E-dawn (陳一端), deputy head of the bank’s economic research department, told a press conference.
The government launched registration of real-estate transaction prices on Aug. 1, a move it views as a first step in enhancing transparency in the real-estate market.
Chen said the move made housing loans in July higher than normal case, while those for last month were much lower.
In a bid to cool down property speculation, the government also asked local lenders not to pursue high housing loans by further lowering their interest rates, Chen said.
This made the average interest rate of new house-purchasing loans from five leading banks rise to 1.903 percent last month, from the 1.892 percent that was recorded in July, the central bank’s data showed.
Chen said the number of building permits issued by the government dropped 2.33 percent from a year ago in the first seven months of the year, reflecting a slowing property market.
The annual growth of construction loans also showed the downturn trend for last month, central bank data showed.
Loans for construction grew 8.68 percent to NT$1.484 trillion last month from a month earlier, lower than the 10.06 percent rise recorded in July, statistics showed.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
SK Hynix Inc warned of increased volatility in the second half of this year despite resilient demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips from big tech providers, reflecting the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs. The company reported a better-than-projected 158 percent jump in March-quarter operating income, propelled in part by stockpiling ahead of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. SK Hynix stuck with a forecast for a doubling in demand for the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) essential to Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, which in turn drive giant data centers built by the likes of Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc. That SK Hynix is maintaining its
RSS