Annual inflation last month expanded at its fastest pace since April, as vegetable prices climbed after the nation was struck by heavy rain and typhoons, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
The consumer price index (CPI) rose 0.83 percent last month compared with a year ago, following a 0.79 percent year-on-year drop in August, the DGBAS said in its latest monthly report.
DGBAS Deputy Director Tsai Yu-tai (蔡鈺泰) attributed the rise in consumer prices last month to a surge in vegetable prices triggered by the various tropical storms — Trami, Kong-rey and Usagi — and torrential rains over the past two months.
“Vegetable prices increased 27.93 percent last month from a year earlier,” Tsai told a press conference.
Although the supply of vegetables during August last year was affected by typhoons, they normalized in September last year for a relatively low basis of comparison, further raising the growth year-on-year for last month, Tsai said.
The significant year-on-year rise in vegetable prices also raised headline inflation by 0.76 percentage points last month, while overall food prices showed a 2.36 percent year-on-year growth, the report showed.
However, fruit prices last month showed a 14.47 percent decline from a year earlier, statistics showed.
Excluding vegetable, fruit and energy prices, core CPI grew by 0.81 percent last month from a year ago, compared with an increase of 0.63 percent in August, DGBAS data showed.
In the first nine months of this year, the headline inflation rose 0.55 percent from a year ago, DGBAS data showed.
The wholesale price index (WPI) extended its trend of year-on-year contraction last month, falling by 2.69 percent from the same period last year, its 19th straight month of decline, the DGBAS said.
The WPI dropped by 2.93 percent in the first nine months of the year.
Capital Securities Corp (群益證券) said consumer prices may maintain mild growth year-on-year in the fourth quarter, amid the continuing fall of prices for heavy commodities.
However, the government’s plan to raise electricity rates from Tuesday last week — which is expected to boost the CPI by 0.19 percentage points in the fourth quarter according to the DGBAS’ forecast — may cause some inflationary pressure, the brokerage house said in its latest report.
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
RSS