Taiwan-US trade rises 7.1%
Taiwan ranked as the US’ 10th-largest trading partner in the first 10 months of the year, with two-way trade totaling US$56.4 billion, up 7.1 percent from a year earlier, statistics released on Tuesday by the US Department of Commerce showed.
In the 10-month period, Taiwanese imports from the US rose 6.6 percent from a year earlier to US$22.27 billion, while Taiwanese exports to the US grew 7.4 percent from a year ago to US$34.15 billion, leaving Taiwan with a trade surplus of US$11.88 billion, up 8.9 percent from a year earlier, the data showed.
In the same 10-month period, bilateral trade between the US and China totaled US$483.6 billion, making Beijing the second-largest trading partner of Washington, the data showed.
Yahoo sees jump in ad clients
Yahoo Inc yesterday forecast that its native advertising clients in Taiwan would double in number in the next two months, given strong demand from small and medium-sized enterprises.
Native advertising allows publishers and advertisers to deliver paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ads belong there.
Eponine Chen (陳婉怡), senior director of Yahoo’s search marketing in Taiwan, said at a media briefing that the company has signed up more than 1,000 local customers since the pay-per-click ads platform was launched in late June.
The company expects the number of its native ads customers to double before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday on Feb. 18, Chen said.
Synnex November sales down
Synnex Technology International Corp (聯強電子), Asia’s largest distributor of information technology products and electronics components, yesterday reported revenue of NT$25.97 billion (US$830.8 million) for last month, a decline of 18 percent from a year earlier, as increased sales of telecom items failed to offset the decline in orders for information technology, consumer electronics and integrated circuit products.
From January through last month, cumulative revenue increased 1 percent to NT$297.9 billion from the same period last year, the company said in a statement.
Sales of information technology products accounted for 54 percent of Synnex’s total revenue in the first 11 months, while IC products made up 26 percent, consumer electronics 15 percent and telecom items 5 percent.
Epistar sales may fall further
Epistar Corp’s (晶元光電) consolidated sales could continue falling this month after declining 7.6 percent month-on-month and 14.7 percent year-on-year to NT$1.8 billion last month, Primasia Securities Co said yesterday.
The sales decline at the nation’s largest LED chipmaker was attributable to a low 50 percent utilization rate for gallium nitride (GaN)-based LEDs, as well as a seasonal slowdown for four-element (aluminum gallium indium phosphide, AlGaInP) LEDs, Primasia said in a client note.
For this quarter, Epistar’s sales could decline by nearly 30 percent from last quarter, the brokerage forecast.
Intel unveils IoT platform
Intel Corp on Tuesday unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) platform — a set of components designed to make it easy for companies to equip their electronic systems with Internet connections.
The Santa Clara, California-based firm said the new platform would let customers get to market faster with simpler products that would deliver secure information.
The company’s business division responsible for the IoT is forecast to grow about 18 percent to more than US$2 billion in sales this year, Doug Davis, the unit’s general manager, said at an event in San Francisco.
“The Internet of Things must scale,” Davis said. “We’re talking about billions of devices that will be connected by the end of this decade.”
Biofund sets up three firms
Diamond Biofund Inc (鑽石生技), the nation’s largest investment fund focusing on the biomedical industry, on Tuesday said that it has invested NT$1.8 billion to set up three companies to develop early-stage biomedical technology in Taiwan.
The fund set up a drug company with capital of NT$1 billion, which will start phase one clinical trials for two drugs by the end of 2016, it said.
The fund also established a drug company with capital of NT$300 million to develop technology that controls metabolic enzymes, and 3D Global Biotech Inc, a company with capital of NT$500 million, to utilize 3D printing technology to make dental transplant and bone substitute, it said.
November tax revenues up 10%
Tax revenues increased 9.9 percent year-on-year to NT$187 billion (US$5.99 billion) last month, as a recovering economy boosted corporate and personal income taxes, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
Corporate income tax rose 4 percent to NT$3.2 billion, while personal income tax increased 25.9 percent to NT$5.3 billion, the ministry’s statistics department deputy director Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳) told a news briefing.
For the first 11 months of the year, tax revenues rose to a record NT$1.85 trillion, up 8.2 percent from the same period last year.
For the full year, tax revenues could exceed the budget by at least NT$100 billion, Hsu said.
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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