EQUITIES
Foreigners still net buyers
Foreign investors last week bought a net NT$7.02 billion (US$253.8 million) of local shares after they bought a net NT$26.46 billion the previous week, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement yesterday. The top three shares bought by foreign investors last week were Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控), Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp (陽明海運) and CTBC Financial Holding Co (中信金控), while the top three sold were United Microelectronics Co (聯電), AU Optronics Corp (友達光電) and Innolux Corp (群創), the exchange said. As of Friday last week, the market capitalization of shares held by foreign investors was NT$22.83 trillion, or 44.21 percent of total market capitalization, it said.
EQUITIES
Trading will not cease
The Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday said that it would not cease trading even though the nation has faced an increasing number of locally transmitted COVID-19 cases. It is important to maintain properly functioning capital markets, the exchange said in a statement, adding that it has an all-encompassing “business continuity plan,” and has implemented work-from-home and off-site working as precautionary measures. In addition, there are also two backup trading systems in separate locations to safeguard uninterrupted operations, the exchange said. “With the cooperation of listed companies and market participants, the exchange firmly believes the capital markets can provide the reliable support the economy needs in this COVID period,” it said.
PLASTIC COMPONENTS
IKKA shares soar on debut
Shares of IKKA Holdings (Cayman) Ltd (第一化成控股), a maker of precision plastic injection-molded components, yesterday rose as much as 125 percent on its debut on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. British Cayman Islands-registered IKKA is the first Japanese company to have a primary listing in Taiwan. Its shares opened at NT$152, compared with an initial offering price of NT$76, and continued moving higher before closing at NT$159, up 109.21 percent. There is no restriction on daily price movements for newly listed shares. Auto parts account for 60.9 percent of IKKA’s sales, with Japanese firms such as Toyota Motor Corp, Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co among its customers.
DISPLAY DRIVERS
FocalTech net profit surges
FocalTech Systems Co (敦泰電子), a supplier of drivers and touch display driver ICs used in flat panels, yesterday reported a net profit of NT$721 million for April, up 2,937 percent from a year earlier, or earnings per share of NT$3.34. The company’s revenue grew 102 percent year-on-year to NT$1.91 billion, the most in the company’s history, on the back of rising prices and shipments, FocalTech said. Revenue in the first four months grew 62.43 percent to NT$6.26 billion, while net profit was NT$1.56 billion, or earnings per share of NT$7.58.
SHIPPING
Wan Hai orders new ships
Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運) yesterday said that it has placed an order for four container vessels with South Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries Co for between NT$13.08 billion and NT$13.8 billion as the company plans to adjust its fleet to cope with its business needs. The four 13,100 twenty-foot-equivalent unit container ships are to be delivered from the second quarter of 2023, Wan Hai said. The price includes potential equipment upgrades on the vessels, it said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to