The TAIEX yesterday jumped 2.53 percent to close at 10,137.87 points, breaching 10,000 points for the first time since Oct. 12, after US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Saturday agreed to suspend new tariffs at the G20 meeting in Argentina.
The weighted index opened higher and rose to 10,055.41 points after two minutes of trading. It continued to climb throughout the session. It ended 249.84 points higher at 10,137.87, from its close of 9,888.03 on Friday.
Turnover was NT$166.84 billion (US$5.43 billion), with foreign institutional investors buying a net NT$5.69 billion of local shares, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
With all sub-indices advancing, the rally was led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), the most heavily weighted stock on the local market, which closed up 4.21 percent at NT$235.
Trump and Xi agreed to suspend any new tariffs for 90 days, providing room for negotiations, but the White House said that the 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods would leap to 25 percent if Beijing does not meet Washington’s demands in that time frame.
News of the ceasefire between the world’s two largest economies also boosted other Asian equity markets.
South Korea’s KOSPI rose 1.67 percent, Japan’s Nikkei 225 increased 1 percent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index added 2.55 percent and the Shanghai Composite Index jumped 2.57 percent.
“Many firms and investors were concerned about the 25 percent tariffs targeting US$200 billion of Chinese goods that were to kick in on Jan. 1. They are shelving orders and production plans, but the truce between the US and China eased their worries,” Xincheng International Investment Consultant (信誠環球投顧) analyst Chang Chih-cheng (張志誠) said.
Local equities are likely to continue rising until the Lunar New Year, but it would be difficult for the TAIEX to breach 11,000 points unless the US and China reach a final agreement, Chang said.
“The ceasefire agreement gave investors an opportunity to take a break, but we cannot rely on it, as the trade disputes will not be eased in the short term,” Fubon Securities Co (富邦證券) executive vice president Michael Kuo (郭永宜) told the Taipei Times on the sidelines of an investment conference in Taipei.
“The trade dispute is like a cancer, which we do not know the biopsy result, if it is benign or malignant, but we can only learn how to deal with it,” Kuo said.
Fubon Securities Investment Services Co (富邦投顧) chairman Charles Hsiao (蕭乾祥) said that it is difficult for China to meet the US’ demands, as it is in conflict with China’s “Made in China 2025” policy, so investors still need to prepare for the worst, he added.
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
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
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