Excitement for Twitter Inc’s coming initial public offering (IPO) is running pretty high, so much so that some investors on Friday mistook the nearly worthless stock of long-dead electronics retailer Tweeter for the tweeting site, sending shares up more than 1,000 percent.
Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, a specialty consumer electronics company that went bankrupt in 2007, saw its most active day of trading in more than six years even though it has nothing to do with the social media site.
The stock, which trades over the counter, closed on Thursday at a price of less than US$0.01 a share and hit a high of US$0.15 a share on Friday. More than 14.3 million shares had traded by midday.
The volume marked an all-time high for the stock, surpassing the 13.05 million shares traded on May 10, 2007, when the company reported quarterly results and said it may choose to file for Chapter 11.
Shares were halted by the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority at 12:47pm, with the stock up 684 percent at US$0.051, under the terms of Rule 6440, which the agency uses in “circumstances in which it is necessary to protect investors and the public interest.”
To say that the stock is normally lightly traded is an understatement. Sometimes several days go by without even 1,000 shares traded over the course of a full session.
However, Tweeter’s share price and volume ticked higher following Twitter’s announcement on Sept. 12 that it had confidentially filed for an IPO.
The moves since then through Thursday were not nearly as extreme, with the stock reaching a high of US$0.035, and between 200,000 and 1.1 million shares traded.
Tweeter filed for bankruptcy in June 2007 and its assets were acquired by Schultze Asset Management on July 13 of that year, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A representative for Schultze was not immediately available for comment.
Twitter publicly filed its IPO documents on Thursday, setting the stage for one of the most anticipated debuts in more than a year.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS