TAXES
Revenue reaches NT$233bn
The nation collected NT$233.9 billion (NT$7.365 billion) in tax revenue last month, an increase of 21.2 percent from a year earlier, mainly due to a surge in corporate income taxes, the Ministry of Finance said on Wednesday. Corporate income taxes reached NT$34.1 billion, jumping 86.4 percent from the same period last year as the local economy improved, the ministry said. Stock transaction taxes retreated 14 percent year-on-year to NT$5.4 billion as risk appetite remained soft, the ministry said. For the first nine months of the year, tax revenue totaled NT$1.7 trillion, a 5.8 percent increase from a year earlier and exceeding the budget target by 6.6 percent, the ministry said.
STOCKS
THSRC issue price set
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC, 台灣高鐵) has settled on an issue price for its Oct. 27 main board listing of NT$15.13, underwriter Fubon Securities Co (富邦證券) said yesterday. The price was determined after the underwriter held an auction for the 16 million common shares to be issued in the listing. The final issuance price was much higher than the NT$11.5 per share tentatively set in a prospectus filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Monday last week. The auction ran from Thursday last week to Tuesday and had a floor price of NT$11.64, Fubon Securities said. As the issue price is higher than NT$11.5, THSRC is expected to generate a higher working capital.
RESTAURANTS
Tai Tong sales increase
Tai Tong Food & Beverage Group (瓦城泰統集團), the operator of three restaurant chains with 95 outlets in Taiwan, posted NT$288.7 million in sales for last month, up 14.5 percent from a year earlier. Aggregate sales in the first nine months of this year totaled NT$2.95 billion, a 13.2 percent increase from the same period last year, Tai Tong said in a statement. The company is upbeat about sales in the fourth quarter, supported by the traditional peak season, the statement said.
PAYMENT SERVICES
Yahoo, CTBC launch Yapee
Yahoo Taiwan Holding Ltd (雅虎) and CTBC Bank Co (中國信託銀行) yesterday jointly launched the Yapee (易付) third-party payment service that aims to achieve a comprehensive online-to-offline shopping experience. The service is secured by CTBC Bank’s enterprise-class authentication, as well as real-name registration of users, the companies said. Transactions are also backed by an escrow service, where funds are held by Yapee to minimize disputes between sellers and buyers. In addition, the service accepts payments from a variety of sources, including credit cards, bank accounts, as well as cash payments to convenience store cashiers, they said.
ELECTRONICS
Vive sales reach 140,000
More than 140,000 Vive virtual reality (VR) headsets have been sold worldwide since the product made its debut in March, HTC Corp (宏達電) chairwoman Cher Wang (王雪紅) told China’s leading VR platform 87870.com earlier this week. Wang’s remarks came after Wang Tsung-ching (汪叢青), head of HTC Vive China, said in August that sales of the devices had exceeded 100,000 at the time. Vive is one of HTC’s gambits to diversify from its core smartphone market in the hope of generating a new revenue stream to turn around its loss-making business.
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
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.
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
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