Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) yesterday said he would respect a legislative decision to amend the stock transaction and capital gains taxes, as the rapid global slowdown warrants economically friendly policies.
The legislature today is expected to approve proposals to cut the stock transaction tax from 0.3 percent to 0.25 percent and set the capital gains tax at 0.05 percent.
The planned change, the fourth of its kind in three years, would leave tax burdens intact for most investors, but would spare active traders a 0.1 percent levy on share transactions totaling NT$1 billion (US$30.62 million) within a year.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“The proposed revision has turned from taxation into a political issue,” Chang told reporters.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) proposed the revision to woo stock investors, Chang said.
The move might also help to settle the longstanding controversy over changes to the taxes and end the policy uncertainty once and for all, Chang added.
The unexpected and rapid economic slowdown lent support to policies favorable to GDP growth, he said, adding that the taxation change could be considered a stimulus measure.
The nation’s export-oriented economy grew 3.84 percent in the first quarter, but slowed to 0.52 percent in the second quarter and is struggling to stay above zero this quarter due to faltering external demand.
The decline in exports showed signs of easing this month after reaching double-digit percentages the past three months, Chang said, adding that the landscape might improve next quarter due to Christmas sales.
To prop up the economy, the ministry is considering commodity tax cuts on new-car purchases and encouraging exports of used cars, Chang said.
While exports of used cars might not lift GDP growth much, it would help boost domestic demand and ease air pollution, as old cars tend to be less environmentally friendly, he said.
The ministry plans to cut the commodity tax for new car purchases by NT$30,000 to NT$50,000, but it is up to the Cabinet to finalize the details, the minister said.
Used cars are badly needed in emerging countries and generate significant revenue for exporters in South Korea and Japan, Chang said.
Used cars carry heavy weight in the local market as well, with two-year-old cars accounting for 50 percent of overall automobiles, the minister said.
The commodity tax cut would provide rental agencies incentives to buy new cars, he said.
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