The nation’s money supply increased year-on-year last month, but the pace of expansion eased from a month earlier as investors cut demand deposits in favor of US dollar holdings, the central bank said.
The M1B reading, which includes cash and cash equivalents and is widely used to track fund movement in the local bourse, increased 6.95 percent last month from a year earlier, the bank said.
The gain is the slowest in 19 months, as investors increased their holdings of the greenback to pay down US dollar-based debts, said Wu Yih-Jiuan (吳懿娟), a deputy director of the central bank’s economic research department.
The strategy made sense given the local currency’s sustained depreciation, closing at NT$31.753 against its US counterpart in Taipei yesterday.
Stock market turnover also shrunk, with the daily average falling to NT$73 billion (US$2.29 billion) last month from NT$79 billion the month before, as renewed economic uncertainty abroad and the nine-in-one elections at home sidelined investors.
M2 — a broad monetary gauge that includes savings deposits, time savings deposits, foreign currency deposits, mutual funds and the narrower M1B — rose 5.22 percent last month from a year ago, accelerating from 4.98 percent in October, the central bank said.
Time deposits saw an increase of 1.39 percent to NT$13.33 trillion last month, the central bank said.
The growth rates might improve this month due to a lower comparison base a year earlier, Wu said.
As of last month, M1B increased by 8.06 percent and M2 advanced by 5.64 percent, both readings being within the central bank’s targets to support a modest economic expansion, Wu said.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
RSS