About US$5.5 billion worth of commercial property changed hands in Taiwan last year, soaring 49 percent from a year earlier to a record high, fueled by strong performance in the industrial sector and a substantial hotel deal, Real Capital Analytics Inc said in a report yesterday.
“Taiwan made record in a positive way, thanks to the benefits of coming down hard on the COVID-19 pandemic and border controls early last year paid dividends for commercial property investors,” said David Green-Morgan, Real Capital managing director for the Asia-Pacific region.
It was the second time that Taiwan outperformed Singapore in commercial property deals, Green-Morgan said.
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, Bloomberg
Industrial investments received a boost from continued realignment of electronics supply chains in the region, prompted by US-China trade tensions and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Real Capital said.
Sales of commercial property in the Asia-Pacific region picked up in the fourth quarter of last year, ending the pandemic-blighted year on a brighter note, it said.
Fourth-quarter sales reached US$44.7 billion, 10 percent lower than the same period in 2019 before the pandemic cast a shadow over the region, it added.
Last year’s sales in the region totaled US$141.2 billion across major income-producing property types, slumping 23 percent from a peak a year earlier, Real Capital said.
Several sectors and geographies surpassed previous levels in terms of dealmaking, despite the challenges presented by lockdowns, travel bans and the dimmed economic outlook, it said.
Taiwan, South Korea and India all hit record acquisition levels as a surge in demand for logistics facilities and data centers bolstered the industrial sector, it said.
Sales of development sites, principally in China, recovered 9 percent in the final quarter from a year earlier, but fell 7 percent for the whole of last year, with annual deal volume of US$628.5 billion, it added.
“The market has steadied and saw a rebound in the fourth quarter after a bleak and uncertain start to 2020,” Green-Morgan said.
The trend bodes well for market activity as Real Capital said it saw a number of deals across the region roll over into this year.
The industrial sector would forge ahead, thanks mainly to record trading of logistics assets and a spike in demand for data centers, it said.
Transactions in the logistics sector exceeded US$13 billion for the third consecutive year, as demand continues to outstrip supply, Real Capital said.
Data center deals more than tripled over the 2019 levels to almost US$5 billion in investment, it said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS