Tatung Co (大同) shares yesterday plunged by the maximum daily limit of 10 percent to NT$18.90, the lowest in three months, after the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) on Tuesday evening changed the company’s classification to a full-delivery stock effective tomorrow.
The TWSE’s move follows the company’s failure to give a clear and satisfactory explanation of why it deprived dozens of shareholders of their voting rights during a board election at the annual shareholders’ meeting on Tuesday morning.
Under the exchange’s regulations, investors are not allowed to engage in margin trading of a full-delivery stock, TWSE spokeswoman Rebecca Chen (陳麗卿) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
Photo: Kelson Wang, Taipei Times
Chen dismissed speculation that the punishment would benefit Tatung management as minority shareholders would find it more difficult to buy the shares.
She said it is a warning to investors that this is a company with high governance risks and they should think twice before buying its shares.
“We demanded that Tatung clarify the dispute at its shareholders’ meeting, but it failed to give a satisfactory answer,” Chen said. “Tatung spent more time explaining its decision to block some shareholders’ voting rights, but the company ignored the fact that it is not a judge nor a government agency.”
“Tatung has set a wrong example of corporate governance,” she added.
Categorizing a company’s stock as full-delivery shares is the third-most severe form of punishment from the TWSE, after suspension of trading and delisting, according to the exchange’s regulations.
Such a punishment is usually meted out to companies with a per-share book value of less than NT$5 or have problematic financial statements, Chen said.
The punishment for Tatung reflects the exchange’s observation that it had seriously breached shareholders’ rights, she said.
TWSE would not relax its punishment until the company clarifies the dispute around the controversial board election, Chen said.
Vivian Tsai (蔡玉真), a Tatung shareholder and a media personality, led a group of 30 Tatung shareholders at a rally outside the Securities and Futures Bureau yesterday.
The group was petitioning the Financial Supervisory Commission to order Tatung to hold a new board election.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, has decided to slow down its 3-nanometer chip production as Intel Corp, one of its major customers, plans to push back the launch of its new Meteor Lake tGPU chipsets to the end of next year, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. That means Intel has canceled almost all of the 3-nanometer capacity booked for next year, with only a small amount of wafer input remaining for engineering verification, the Taipei-based researcher said in a report. Based on Intel’s original schedule, TSMC was to start producing the new chipsets in
DATA SHOW DOWNTURN: Manufacturing in Taiwan contracted as production and demand slumped, while growth in chip exports last month eased in South Korea World chip sales growth has decelerated for six straight months in another sign that the global economy is straining under the weight of rising interest rates and mounting geopolitical risks. Semiconductor sales rose 13.3 percent in June from a year earlier, down from 18 percent in May, data from the global peak industry body showed. The slowdown is the longest since the US-China trade dispute in 2018. The three-month moving average in chip sales has correlated with the global economy’s performance in the past few decades. The latest weakness comes as concern about a worldwide recession has prompted chipmakers such as Samsung
Italy is close to clinching a deal initially worth US$5 billion with Intel Corp to build an advanced semiconductor packaging and assembly plant in the country, two sources briefed on discussions said yesterday. Intel’s investment in Italy is part of a wider plan announced by the US chipmaker earlier this year to invest US$88 billion in building capacity across Europe, which is striving to cut its reliance on Asian chip imports and ease a supply crunch that has curbed output in the region’s strategic auto sector. Asking not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, the sources said the
Malaysia is scrambling to protect its assets as the descendants of the last sultan of the remote Philippine region of Sulu look to enforce a US$15 billion arbitration award in a dispute over a colonial-era land deal. In 1878, two European colonists signed a deal with the sultan for the use of his territory in present-day Malaysia — an agreement that independent Malaysia honored until 2013, paying the monarch’s descendants about US$1,000 per year. Now, 144 years later after the original deal, Malaysia is on the hook for the second-largest arbitration award on record for stopping the payments after a bloody incursion