Hong Kong’s exports last month rebounded on the back of a recovering Chinese economy, Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan (陳茂波) said in a blog post yesterday.
The territory’s third-quarter GDP should show a significant improvement from the two preceding three-month periods, Chan said.
Hong Kong’s GDP slumped by about 9 percent in both the first and second quarters as the COVID-19 pandemic forced most countries to go into some form of lockdown.
Photo: EPA-EFE
China, on which Hong Kong relies for half of its trade, posted 9.9 percent growth in exports and a 13.2 percent jump in imports last month, Chan said.
Consumer consumption in Hong Kong is also recovering, with the territory so far managing to keep COVID-19 under control, and residents’ spending has increased, the financial secretary said.
Economic pressure would ease further as China recharges its economy, he added.
“In Hong Kong, the epidemic situation has been generally stable,” Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) said in a separate post on the government’s Web site. “This has not only given us some breathing space, but also allowed us to take more precise control measures and resume more economic and social activities gradually while keeping the epidemic in check.”
Hong Kong’s jobless rate for the July-to-September period increased to 6.4 percent, a 16-year high, as the service industry virtually shut down because of the pandemic.
The territory’s government has released more than HK$300 billion (US$38.71 billion) in relief measures this year, Chan said.
Meanwhile, there should be more mutual investment between China and Hong Kong to boost local markets’ access to capital, a top official at China’s securities regulator said.
China is aiming for a bigger ratio of A shares in the MSCI index, while encouraging more foreign investment into the mainland on top of current so-called connect products with Hong Kong, China Securities Regulatory Commission Vice Chairman Fang Xinghai (方星海) said at the Second Bund Summit in Shanghai on Saturday.
Fang called for the studying of more paths for foreign investors to participate in China’s market on top of current connectivity programs.
China would expand the opening of futures products to foreign investors, and crack down on fraud in listed companies to safeguard its international image, Fang said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts