BROKERAGES
Profits up on higher turnover
Statistics compiled by the Taiwan Stock Exchange showed that local securities firms posted NT$550 million (US$17.23 million) in net profit last month, as the average daily turnover on the main board grew 14.37 percent from a month earlier to NT$75.6 billion, leading to a 17 percent increase in fee income. However, in the first 11 months of this year, securities firms posted net profit of NT$19.4 billion, compared with NT$21.2 billion the previous year, as the average daily turnover shrank by 15 percent year-on-year, the exchange said.
BANKING
Yuan deposits bounce back
Yuan deposits increased 0.16 percent month-on-month to 309.023 billion yuan (US$44.56 billion) last month, reversing a decline the previous month, driven mainly by local companies’ fund management, the central bank said yesterday. Yuan deposits at banks’ domestic banking units grew 0.62 percent to 273.65 billion yuan from the previous month, while yuan deposits at their overseas banking units declined 3.26 percent to 35.38 billion yuan, the central bank said.
CHIP TESTERS
SPIL cuts capital expenditure
Siliconware Precision Industries Co Ltd (SPIL, 矽品精密) yesterday said its board approved capital expenditure of NT$15.5 billion for next year, compared with a budget of NT$17.9 billion this year. Next year’s expenditure would be used to boost capacity and in research and development, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
BANKING
Manila branch to open today
State-run First Commercial Bank (第一銀行), the banking arm of First Financial Holding Co (第一金控), is to open a branch in Manila today, when it is scheduled to obtain an operating license from the Philippine regulator, the local lender said in a statement yesterday. The branch would help extend the company’s presence in ASEAN markets in line with the government’s “new southbound policy” intended to cut the nation’s economic dependence on China. The Manila branch is mainly to focus on lending, savings, trade financing, remittances and foreign exchange, it said.
ELECTRONICS
HTC’s Vive to be No. 2 seller
HTC Corp’s (宏達電) Vive virtual-reality headset is expected to rank as the No. 2 bestseller worldwide in its category this year, advisory firm Canalys said on Wednesday. Canalys forecast HTC would ship 500,000 units this year, second only to Sony Corp’s PlayStation VR with an estimated 800,000 units. HTC’s US$100 discount on the Vive on Black Friday and Cyber Monday during the US Thanksgiving season was one of the factors that helped boost its sales in the US market, Canalys said. Another factor was HTC’s big marketing push in China, it said.
INTERNET
Meitu Inc IPO disappoints
Chinese beauty app Meitu Inc (美圖) clung to its offer price on its first day of trading, a less-than-stellar debut for Hong Kong’s largest technology initial public offering (IPO) in almost a decade. Meitu’s shares closed at HK$8.50, unchanged from the offer price set at the bottom of a marketed range. The mobile app developer and phone maker is valued at HK$35.9 billion (US$4.6 billion). Meitu expects its Internet services, which include ads and virtual gifts, to break even by the end of next year, according to its prospectus.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
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
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
RSS