AIRLINES
CAL’s A350 to arrive in July
Taiwan’s largest air carrier, China Airlines (CAL, 華航), yesterday announced that it would receive its first A350-900 — Airbus SAS’ newest wide-body jetliner — next year. CAL, which has ordered 14 A350s, is to be the first Taiwanese carrier to operate the new aircraft. Assembly work on the first of the aircraft ordered is to begin next month, with delivery scheduled for July, CAL said.
EMPLOYMENT
Industrial job vacancies fall
Job vacancies in the industrial and service sectors totaled 199,000 at the end of August, translating into a job vacancy rate of 2.61 percent, according to the results of a semi-yearly survey published yesterday by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. Vacancies fell 41,000 from February and 39,000 from the same period last year, mainly due to an economic slowdown. Meanwhile, the job vacancy rate fell 0.56 percentage points from February and 0.54 percentage points from the same period last year, the agency said. At the end of August, there were 73,000 vacancies in the manufacturing sector, accounting for 36.5 percent of the total.
STOCK MARKETS
Fund postpones meeting
The National Stabilization Fund Committee yesterday said that it would convene for a quarterly meeting on Jan. 18 at 4pm to deliberate whether the fund would continue to remain active in the market. The committee said that its quarterly meetings usually take place before the 15th day of a month, but for the first quarter of next year the date has been changed to avoid conducting the talks before the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections. First activated in August at the onset of a global stock rout, the fund was kept active in October due to lingering uncertainties caused by expectations of an interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve.
SECURITIES
AUO tops overbought list
The Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday said that the securities net overbought position by foreign investors last week was NT$8.79 billion (US$266.2 million). The three securities that reported the highest overbought positions by foreign investors during period were AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), Innolux Corp (群創) and Inventec Corp (英業達). The top three securities that reported the highest oversold positions by foreign investors were Siliconware Precision Industries Co Ltd (矽品精密), E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) and SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控).
BANKING
Banks launch HCE support
MasterCard and Visa yesterday launched their host card emulation (HCE) mobile payment solution for credit cardholders in Taiwan. HCE allows any near-field communication app on Android devices running version 4.4 or later to emulate a smartcard through tokenization, enabling consumers to use their smartphones to make payments without additional hardware, while permitting financial institutions to host payment accounts in a secure virtual cloud. E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) is the first financial institution in the nation to add Visa’s HCE support to its mobile wallet application, while MasterCard has enlisted Taishin International Bank (台新銀行), CTBC Bank Co Ltd (中國信託銀行) and Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), with plans to expand the number of partner banks to 23 next year.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Japanese technology giant Softbank Group Corp said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia Corp, raising US$5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based Softbank said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia last month, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Softbank reported its profit in the April-to-September period soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about US$13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7 percent year-on-year
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
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