Hong Kong’s private home prices broke historic records for the 13th straight month last month, with the ascent showing no immediate signs of ending and analysts expecting the rise to continue into next year.
Private home prices rose 1.08 percent last month, marking the fastest pace of growth in six months, data compiled by the Rating and Valuation Department and released yesterday showed.
The index, which began its climb in April 2016, surged 13.1 percent year-on-year, the data showed.
The territory’s flats are ranked the second-most expensive in the world after Monaco, according to data from property consultancy Knight Frank, which shows US$1 million would only buy 19m2 of prime property in Hong Kong, as opposed to 25m2 in New York or 30m2 in London.
“Property prices are high and it’s unaffordable for most ordinary people,” Knight Frank senior director Thomas Lam said. “But right now, I cannot see any major factor that will drastically bring down property prices in the short run.”
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) said during an interview last week that the government “has no ways to curb property prices,” adding that while she would do her best to seek more land to boost supply, she has never promised to turn around the price rise.
Major property consultancies expect Hong Kong’s housing market to remain feverish in the coming year and climb a further 5 to 20 percent.
The government has tried to rein in prices with additional taxes and regulations, which came on top of eight rounds of mortgage tightening since 2009 by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the territory’s de facto central bank.
However, the net effect of measures like taxes on second homes has been to discourage buying and selling in the territory’s secondary market, Jones Lang LaSalle Inc head of capital markets Joseph Tsang (曾煥平) said.
“I think their intention is good, but they’re using the wrong medicine,” Tsang said. “After eight years, your fever is still going on, and they just don’t want to admit they gave you the wrong medicine.”
A government report released earlier this month said it would be a “huge challenge” to meet its 10-year housing supply target of 460,000 units, which includes 280,000 public housing units.
The quantity of land identified for public housing construction lags behind the target by 15 percent.
“There is no easy or painless option to increase or expedite land supply,” the report stated.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
RSS