Yuan deposits at Taiwanese banks fell 2.88 percent to 326.94 billion yuan (US$51.29 billion) last month from July, as the Chinese currency’s widening volatility fueled unease among corporate and individual clients, the central bank said yesterday.
It was the second consecutive month of decline and the fastest pace of retreat since Taiwan allowed yuan deposits in February last year, the central bank said.
“Taiwanese companies and individuals turned more cautious about yuan holdings after seeing wide swings in the wake of the fixing reform,” a central bank official said.
The People’s Bank of China on Aug. 11 cut the official guidance rate for the yuan by 1.9 percent to 6.2298 per US dollar, from 6.1162 the previous day.
Some pundits saw the change as an effort by China to boost its exports amid a global economic slowdown, while others saw it as a move to push for the yuan’s inclusion in the IMF’s reserve currency basket.
Several research institutes have trimmed their forecasts of the yuan against the US dollar this year, but stand pat on expectations about its appreciation in the long run.
In Taiwan, yuan deposits plunged 7.3 percent monthly to 49.79 billion yuan last month at local lenders’ offshore banking units (OBUs) and shrank 2 percent to 277.15 billion yuan at their domestic banking units (DBUs), the central bank said. The former operations serve mainly corporate customers and the latter service individual clients.
The fixing change makes the yuan more in tandem with market movements, posing both upside and downside investment risks like all other currencies, rather than moving in one direction, the central bank official said.
Growing volatility did not weaken the yuan as a payment tool among Taiwanese firms or individuals.
Remittance at DBUs soared 53.63 percent last month to 235.41 billion yuan and rose 53.37 percent to 171.89 billion yuan at OBUs, the central bank said.
“Local companies have grown increasingly comfortable with doing business in yuan, especially technology companies with operations in China,” the bank official said.
Yuan-based negotiable certificates of deposit (NCD) reached 2.85 billion yuan at DBUs in July, the first official data available after the central bank allowed lenders to issue the certificates denominated in foreign currencies.
The deregulation is aimed at boosting yuan deposits and foreign currency-related investments in the local market as Taiwan seeks to catch up with Hong Kong in its bid to become a regional financial hub.
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could