China General Plastics Corp (CGPC, 華夏) shares yesterday surged by the 10 percent daily limit to this year’s highest level of NT$36.3, after the firm gave an optimistic outlook for the rest of the year.
The Taipei-based company — which manufactures polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) products — has seen its stock rise by more than 45 percent since the beginning of the year.
CGPC on Monday said that product prices are to hover at relatively high levels in the coming quarters.
Major markets are forecast to remain undersupplied in the near term, boosting PVM and VCM prices in the second half, company vice president Hu Chi-hung (胡吉宏) told investors, attributing the shortage of petrochemical products to China’s higher environmental standards.
Some of CGPC’s Asian competitors are scheduled to conduct regular maintenance this quarter, which would also reduce the region’s overall output, Hu added.
PVC prices reached US$920 per tonne in Asia this month, compared with about US$800 in the same period last year, S&P Global Platts statistics showed.
The company also expects improving demand for PVC from its Indian customers in the coming quarters, as clients adapt to changes in tax regulations.
India last month launched a new goods and services tax (GST) to replace central and state indirect taxes.
To cope with growing demand and to improve operating efficiency, the company said it has been working on several capacity expansion projects.
The company plans to raise its VCM capacity from 1,350 tonnes per day to 1,400 tonnes per day this quarter.
CGPC also aims to boost its annual PVC capacity from 400,000 tonnes to 420,000 tonnes over the next three years, it said.
The company’s net income for the January-to-June period reached NT$678 million (US$22.38 million), a 10 percent increase from NT$616 million a year earlier. That represents earnings per share of NT$1.28, compared with NT$1.23 in the same period last year, according to a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
FORESEEABLE CONSEQUENCES: New technology always comes with new innovations by the iniquitous in exploiting users for financial gain or more nefarious ends Artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” say they can save users time and energy by automating tasks, but the growing power of systems such as OpenClaw is putting cybersecurity experts on edge. Powered by a wave of hype, OpenClaw today says it has more than three million users worldwide. The system allows users to create so-called agents, tools based on a large language model (LLM) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic PBC’s Claude, that can carry out online tasks. “We’ve moved from an AI you could talk with via a chatbot to an agentic AI, which can take action... the threat and the risks are
RSS