INVESTMENT
Foreigners net buyers
Foreign investors last week bought a net NT$42.43 billion (US$1.54 billion) of local shares after buying a net NT$29.96 billion a week earlier, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement yesterday. As of Friday, foreign investors had bought NT$72.39 billion of local shares since the beginning of this year, it said. Last week, the top three shares that foreign investors bought were Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and Taishin Financial Holding Co (台新金控), while the top three sold were Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), China Airlines Ltd (中華航空) and SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控), the exchange said. As of Friday, the market cap of shares held by foreign investors was NT$25.22 trillion, or 44.27 percent of total market capitalization, it said.
ELECTRONICS
Ichia profit rises 6 percent
Flexible printed circuit board and handset keypad maker Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技) yesterday reported pretax profit of NT$67.25 million for last quarter, up 6 percent from a year earlier, while revenue rose 4.3 percent year-on-year to NT$1.61 billion. The company said orders remained strong in the October-to-December quarter on the back of robust demand from clients in the automotive electronics and consumer electronics businesses. However, shipments were curtailed by a shortage of raw materials in the supply chain, causing gross margin to fall to 12 percent from 14 percent a year earlier. For the whole of last year, pretax profit rose 41 percent year-on-year to NT$267 million
APPAREL
Makalot income surges 25%
Makalot Industrial Co Ltd (聚陽) yesterday reported that pretax income last year rose 25.1 percent annually to NT$3.4 billion, as it continued to improve its product mix and raise its gross margin, despite the COVID-19 pandemic affecting operations in regional supply chains. Earnings per share were NT$14.33 last year, the highest in the company’s history. The manufacturer of ready-to-wear apparel said that its revenue for last year expanded 16.1 percent to NT$28.93 billion.
E-COMMERCE
EHS earnings hit record
Eastern Home Shopping & Leisure Co (EHS, 東森購物) yesterday reported record earnings per share of NT$17.7 for last year, up from the previous year’s NT$14.11, as revenue from online sales increased 47 percent from NT$7.2 billion to NT$10.6 billion, the company said. Last year, consolidated revenue increased 14.7 percent to NT$28.32 billion, it said. For this year, EHS said it aims to boost online sales to NT$24 billion and lift overall revenue to NT$45.6 billion on the back of contributions from TV shopping and telemarketing, it added.
ELECTRONICS
Qisda secures new loans
Electronics maker Qisda Inc (佳世達) on Thursday said that it had secured two new sustainability-linked loans totaling about NT$1.83 billion from E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) and DBS Bank Ltd’s (星展銀行) Taipei branch. The lenders would track Qisda’s sustainability performance over a two-year period and provide preferential interest rates, a company statement said. The electronics maker has accumulated NT$14 billion in sustainability-linked loans, along with NT$12 billion of such loans obtained from Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) and First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) last year.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday said the DRAM supply crunch could extend through 2028, as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom has led the world’s major memory makers to dramatically reduce production of standard DRAM and allocate a significant portion of their capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. The most severe supply constraints would stretch to the first half of next year due to “very limited” increases in new DRAM capacity worldwide, Nanya Technology president Lee Pei-ing (李培瑛) told a news briefing. The company plans to increase monthly 12-inch wafer capacity to 20,000 in the first half of 2028 after a
Taiwan has enough crude oil reserves for more than 100 days and sufficient natural gas reserves for more than 11 days, both above the regulatory safety requirement, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said yesterday, adding that the government would prioritize domestic price stability as conflicts in the Middle East continue. Overall, energy supply for this month is secure, and the government is continuing efforts to ensure sufficient supply for next month, Kung told reporters after meeting with representatives from business groups at the ministry in Taipei. The ministry has been holding daily cross-ministry meetings at the Executive Yuan to ensure
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
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