Transactions of residential and commercial properties in Taipei and New Taipei City (新北市) for last month rose more than 15 percent from a month earlier, as the impact of the two-year luxury tax — designed to curb rising property prices — faded, according to statistics released yesterday.
Citing the statistics, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋), one of the nation’s leading property sales agencies, said transactions of shops, offices and homes in the two major cities in northern Taiwan grew 15.8 percent month-on-month last month, two years after the luxury tax was implemented.
Effective from June 2011, the luxury tax is aimed at curbing soaring property prices in the local market, in particular in northern Taiwan.
Under the tax scheme, a 15 percent tax was introduced on second homes not occupied by the owners and sold within one year of purchase. For such homes sold within two years of purchase, the sales tax was set at 10 percent.
Evertrust researcher Andy Huang (黃舒衛) said that a lot of sellers put their properties bought before the tax implementation up for sale because they were no longer subject to the tax levy.
On the back of an increased supply in the market, the total number of property sales in Taipei was 4,043 units last month, up 20 percent from June, while transactions in New Taipei rose 13.7 percent from a month earlier to 8,066 units, Huang said.
Huang said Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) attracted many home buyers last month, when developers launched new residential property projects and supply of second-hand homes expanded in the area.
For New Taipei, booming new home sales in Sinjhuang (新莊), Zhonghe (中和), Sindian (新店) and Banciao (板橋) districts boosted the entire transactions in the city, Huang said.
Huang said that as the central bank is keeping interest rates low in a bid to boost the local economy, property transactions in Taipei and New Taipei are expected to stay stable in the second half of this year.
Meanwhile, local media cited statistics compiled by Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋), another property agency, as reporting that sales of residential and commercial properties for last month in Greater Taichung and Greater Tainan rose 17 percent and 12 percent respectively, from the previous month to hit 5,198 units and 2,163 units.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS