The business confidence gauge for the manufacturing sector was 97.72 last month, down by 0.48 points from the previous month, as companies expects business to be flat in the coming six months, the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) said yesterday.
The decline ended five months of increase, as doubts are mounting over the popularity of Apple Inc’s latest handset models, boding ill for local suppliers.
“The confidence level is flattening after a modest pickup in the last few months, as the iPhone 7 is not enough to drive the economy,” TIER Economic Forecasting Center director Gordon Sun (孫明德) told a media briefing.
While US wireless carriers said they see robust demand for iPhone 7, Germany research body GfK’s channel checks showed that the iPhone 7’s launch sales in Europe were 25 percent lower than those of iPhone 6.
The report weighed on Apple shares over the weekend and on the shares of Taiwanese companies in its supply chain yesterday.
TIER said that 13.5 percent of local manufacturers are upbeat about their business prospects, down by 12.8 percentage points from a month earlier, while the percentage of companies with pessimistic views about their businesses dropped from 20.2 percent to 18.4 percent. That means most firms have neutral views.
The business confidence reading edged up from 84.07 in July to 84.47 last month thanks to rallies on the local bourse, Sun said, adding that securities houses gained confidence while wholesalers turned downbeat.
Sun said he failed to see reasons for continued optimism, as equity performances are unpredictable.
The business climate among real-estate related sectors weakened from 89.46 in July to 87.71 last month as Ghost Month depressed property transactions.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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