Commercial property transactions totaled NT$67.64 billion (US$2.32 billion) in the July-to-September quarter, more than doubling from the previous quarter and a year earlier, driven by self-occupancy and investment demand from local technology and insurance companies, Cushman & Wakefield Taiwan (戴德梁行) said yesterday.
Local capital drove all of the deals, of which 72 percent were concentrated in Taipei, Taoyuan and Tainan, Cushman & Wakefield said.
Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽), the main subsidiary of Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), acquired Sunworld Dynasty Hotel Taipei (王朝大酒店) near the Taipei Arena MRT Station for NT$25.52 billion, the property consultancy said.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
The transaction came with an agreement from the property’s US owner, Sunrider International, to lease the complex to keep the hotel going and generate rent income for Fubon Life.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, bought three factories in Tainan for NT$9.35 billion to meet capacity expansion needs, Cushman & Wakefield said.
Adding another purchase of NT$660 million last quarter, TSMC poured more than NT$10 billion into the commercial property market, becoming a major contributor, it said.
Sales of partial floors at an office building in Taipei’s prime Xinyi District (信義) above the Taipei City Hall MRT Station surprised the market with a record price of nearly NT$1.8 million per ping (3.3m2), Cushman & Wakefield said.
Chiayi-based Ying Chan Development Co (營展開發) bought the entire 16th floor for NT$1.24 billion and affiliated Ying Fu Development Co (盈福開發) purchased part of the 29th floor for NT$650 million one month apart, it said.
The transactions showed that prices for grade-A office space in the district are approaching that for luxury residential apartments, the most expensive property products in Taiwan, due to strong demand and scarce supply, Cushman & Wakefield said.
The housing market also recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic judging by transaction volumes and prices, Cushman & Wakefield Taiwan general manager Billy Yen (顏炳立) said.
Yen attributed the fast recovery to accommodative monetary policy in Taiwan and around the world.
Presale projects proved the most popular, as they were priced at roughly the same levels as existing homes, Yen said, calling the phenomenon unreasonable.
Existing homes should be sold at discount rates relative to presale and new housing projects, he said.
Yen hesitated to bet on a sustained recovery that is modest in scale for the time being.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
RSS