Medigen files suit amid selloff
Drugmaker Medigen Biotechnology Corp (基亞) yesterday filed a slander lawsuit against Chinese-language Wealth (財訊) magazine for a report alleging that Medigen’s development of liver cancer drug PI-88 was fraudulent, seeking NT$100 million (US$3.33 million) in compensation.
The company’s shares fell by the daily maximum of 7 percent for the 16th consecutive session, to close at NT$139.5 yesterday on the GRETAI Securities Market. Medigen’s market capitalization has been cut by NT$40 billion since last month.
The sell-off, triggered by a failed clinical trial of the company’s new liver cancer drug, has set a record for the longest consecutive limit-down streak in the history of Taiwan’s equity markets.
FamilyMart widens pastry line
Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店), the nation’s second-largest convenience store operator, expects a 15 percent growth in sales of breads and baked goods following yesterday’s launch of prepackaged, rice-flour-based pastries.
The company, which operates about 3,000 stores throughout the nation, said that the new products aim to provide an alternative to popular pastry products made with wheat flour.
The convenience store is pursuing a bigger share of the baked-goods market — estimated at NT$20 billion annually — with the new products.
China Steel’s profit rises 17%
China Steel Corp’s (CSC, 中鋼) pretax profit last month grew 17 percent from June, to NT$2.735 billion, with total pretax profit in the first seven months of the year reaching NT$14.429 billion, the company said yesterday in a statement.
Earnings per share on a pretax basis were NT$0.17 last month and NT$0.94 for the January-to-July period, the company said.
Revenue increased 1 percent to NT$30.643 billion from the previous month, rising 6.24 percent from a year earlier, with cumulative revenue rising 6.23 percent to NT$215.22 billion from the previous year, the statement said.
Unemployment might rise
The nation’s jobless rate for last month might rise to 4.01 percent from 3.92 percent in June, with the rate for this year reaching 3.97 percent, according to the government’s job-matching Web site.
The Ministry of Labor’s ejob.gov.tw site made the forecast earlier this month, prior to the announcement of last month’s jobless rate by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), expected on Friday.
June’s 3.92 percent was the lowest for the month since 2001, while the number of employed people in Taiwan in June totaled 11.06 million, up 0.09 percent from one month earlier, the DGBAS said.
Apple taps China Telecom
Apple Inc is shifting Chinese users’ iCloud data to servers run by China Telecom Corp (中國電信), a move that may address concern that the information could be a security vulnerability.
The data is encrypted, so state-controlled China Telecom would not be able to access it, Apple said in an e-mailed statement on Saturday. Apple’s iCloud service lets users store contacts, e-mails, photographs and other personal information on external systems they can access across devices.
Sales from the region, including Taiwan and Hong Kong, made up 16 percent of Apple’s US$37.4 billion in revenue last quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. iPad sales in China increased by 51 percent and Mac sales by 39 percent, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said on July 23.
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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