Applications to defer credit card payments last month plunged 90 percent from June, suggesting a tapering of loan demand, Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐銀行) said yesterday, citing its own statistics.
Mega International attributed the rapid decline to a quick recovery in consumer activity after the public health situation stabilized in late July following a domestic outbreak of COVID-19 in May, allowing most businesses to resume operations.
The Financial Supervisory Commission in May asked domestic banks to provide interest-free moratoriums of three to six months to customers with credit card and loan payments due in June, Mega International said.
The move was intended to help people and companies hit hard by a level 3 COVID-19 alert that virtually halted all consumer activity except for purchases of daily necessities, the bank said.
Deferral applications in June surged 15-fold from May, but they subsided after the government on July 27 lowered the alert to level 2.
The slump in deferral applications shows that cash needs have eased further, the bank said, adding that its latest data on the nation’s inflationary gauge and tax revenue supported its observation.
The consumer price index grew 2.63 percent year-on-year last month, while tax revenue rose 13.1 percent to NT$302 billion (US$10.82 billion) as demand picked up, bolstering business and sales tax revenue, the bank said.
Mega International expects business to continue to improve, as major department stores are set to launch anniversary sale promotions and the government’s Quintuple Stimulus Voucher program would encourage spending.
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
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
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
RSS