More than 80 percent of mutual fund investors in Taiwan prefer funds with monthly dividends over other fund types, in line with their peers in Hong Kong and Singapore, but not those in the US, Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan Ltd (渣打台灣銀行) said on Wednesday last week.
Local investors like to receive fund returns regularly even though funds yield less than other investments, Standard Chartered Taiwan’s head of wealth management Cindy Fu (傅敏儀) said.
Most fund investors just deposit the dividends into their bank accounts and receive returns that are no higher than regular savings, Fu said, adding that they should invest the earnings into other funds, “so money can make money.”
While funds are generally viewed as low-risk investment options, many investors still sit on the fence, the bank said, citing its recent survey.
Of the survey’s respondents, 49.5 percent said they were worried about potential losses, choosing the right investment and having no time to do research.
In Taiwan, online fund investors care mostly about transaction fees and risk disclosures, while those investing in funds offline depend more on professional advice from financial experts and are cautious about Internet transactions and information security, the survey found.
Investors in Taiwan held NT$2.49 trillion (US$81 billion) in onshore funds in September, down from NT$2.52 trillion a month earlier, while their holdings in offshore funds remained flat at NT$3.48 trillion, data compiled by the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association (證券投信投顧公會) showed.
PESSIMISM
US-China trade tensions, a surge in US Department of the Treasury yields, the slowdown in economic growth in the third quarter and the US midterm elections tomorrow, have made investors pessimistic about stock market prospects in the months ahead, JPMorgan Asset Management Taiwan Ltd (摩根資產管理) said.
As of Oct. 26, that has caused a massive sell-off across Asia’s equity markets by foreign institutional investors, with the markets in Taiwan, China and South Korea hit the hardest, JPMorgan said in a report on Monday last week.
The Shanghai Composite Index has fallen to its lowest level since 2014 and is down 19 percent this year.
Over the period, South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index on Friday declined by about 15 percent since the beginning of this year, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 11.5 percent and the TAIEX dropped nearly 7 percent.
JPMorgan said declines in share prices would likely be short-lived, as corporations in Taiwan, China, India, the Philippines and Thailand are expected to make more profits this year than last year, due to their solid fundamentals.
Six Taiwanese companies, including contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), made the 2025 Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest firms by revenue. In a report published by New York-based Fortune magazine on Tuesday, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (better known as Foxconn) ranked highest among Taiwanese firms, placing 28th with revenue of US$213.69 billion. Up 60 spots from last year, TSMC rose 60 places to reach No. 126 with US$90.16 billion in revenue, followed by Quanta Computer Inc. at 348th, Pegatron Corp. at 461st, CPC Corp., Taiwan at 494th and Wistron Corp. at 496th. According to Fortune, the world’s
NEW PRODUCTS: MediaTek plans to roll out new products this quarter, including a flagship mobile phone chip and a GB10 chip that it is codeveloping with Nvidia Corp MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday projected that revenue this quarter would dip by 7 to 13 percent to between NT$130.1 billion and NT$140 billion (US$4.38 billion and US$4.71 billion), compared with NT$150.37 billion last quarter, which it attributed to subdued front-loading demand and unfavorable foreign exchange rates. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said that the forecast factored in the negative effects of an estimated 6 percent appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar against the greenback. “As some demand has been pulled into the first half of the year and resulted in a different quarterly pattern, we expect the third quarter revenue to decline sequentially,”
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
DIVERSIFYING: Taiwanese investors are reassessing their preference for US dollar assets and moving toward Europe amid a global shift away from the greenback Taiwanese investors are reassessing their long-held preference for US-dollar assets, shifting their bets to Europe in the latest move by global investors away from the greenback. Taiwanese funds holding European assets have seen an influx of investments recently, pushing their combined value to NT$13.7 billion (US$461 million) as of the end of last month, the highest since 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Over the first half of this year, Taiwanese investors have also poured NT$14.1 billion into Europe-focused funds based overseas, bringing total assets up to NT$134.8 billion, according to data from the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association (SITCA),
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