Housing transactions last month totaled 17,591 units in the six special municipalities, down 29.7 percent from one month earlier, as the market started to feel the chilling effect of a local COVID-19 outbreak.
The number represented a 25 percent decline from the same month last year, data from land administration agencies in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung showed.
Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) said the latest data reflect deals that mainly took place in June, as it takes about one month to registers a transaction.
Photo: Hsieh Wu-hsiung, Taipei Times
The market started to improve last month, when the daily number of local COVID-19 infections dropped to between 20 and 30, and the government allowed the conditional reopening of entertainment and recreational facilities last week, Sinyi researcher Tseng Ching-der (曾進德) said yesterday, adding that the government data are a lagging indicator.
Taichung reported the steepest month-on-month decline of 44.1 percent to 2,657 deals, followed by Taipei’s 34.7 percent fall to 1,937 transactions, local government figures showed.
Transactions in Taoyuan and Kaohsiung both shrank 29 percent to 3,011 and 2,981 deals respectively.
The number of transactions in Tainan slid 22 percent to 2,545 units, while New Taipei City posted a 20.5 percent decline to 4,460 deals, data showed.
Tseng said the worst is likely over, judging by house-hunting interest, although uncertainty lingers.
Health authorities yesterday said they would extend the level 2 alert next week, but modestly loosen gathering restrictions for certain venues.
In the first seven months of this year, total transactions in the six cities totaled 152,000 units, up 15.6 percent from a year earlier, data showed.
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
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
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],”
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