The stock rout has driven the majority of Taiwanese to postpone plans to buy real estate, as they fear the TAIEX’s poor performance might foreshadow an economic downturn that would erode their income, a survey by Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) showed yesterday.
Of the survey’s respondents, 57 percent said they had put house purchase plans on hold after the local bourse slumped 16 percent from a peak of 18,600 points in January to 15,600 points earlier this month.
The TAIEX’s slump is compromising down payments for 25 percent of prospective buyers and raising doubt regarding economic showings for another 32 percent, leaving only one-third unaffected, the survey said.
Photo: CNA
“The property market this year might not receive a boost from investment gains as seen in the past two years following repeated rallies in the TAIEX,” Sinyi research manager Tseng Ching-der (曾進德) said.
Small and open, the local bourse is not spared from price corrections across the globe as major central banks steeply hike interest rates to tame inflation, a policy move that tends to induce an economic slowdown.
Value losses are not limited to stock investments as digital currencies, popular among young and tech-savvy investors, incur heavier losses, Tseng said.
Share prices are widely deemed leading economic indicators, ahead of actual economic performance by three to six months, he said.
The stock rout reflects institutional investors’ concerns about a possible economic turnaround in the second half of this year and beyond, even though Taiwanese companies have provided rosy earnings guidances for this year, Tseng said.
Inventory corrections are bound to hit leading Taiwanese electronics suppliers that have benefited from aggressive inventory build-up by global clients over the past two years to cope with supply chain bottlenecks linked to COVID-19 lockdowns, heavyweight stock analysts have said.
The benefits seen during the COVID-19 pandemic would rapidly disappear as the US, Europe and other markets have chosen to live with the virus, analysts said, citing poor sales of smartphones and laptops as evidence.
A global financial crisis would seriously hurt Taiwan’s housing market, as in 2008 and 2009, but it would quickly recover from transient and isolated incidents like the level-3 alert in May lasy year, Tseng said.
If COVID-19 infections stabilize and the TAIEX stops bleeding promptly, the property market would soon come out of the woods, Tseng said, adding that it would be a disaster if price corrections persisted.
POTENTIAL SETBACK: Although Chinese chip designers and foundry firms already have US EDA software, they might be unable to update those programs under new US rules The US’ latest ban on advanced electronic design automation (EDA) software exports to China might hinder Chinese chip companies from accessing advanced semiconductor technology, as they attempt to upgrade to 3-nanometer processes in the next three to five years, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security on Friday announced bans on EDA tools for gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFET), a new-generation semiconductor technology that US chipmaker Intel Corp and Samsung Electronics Co from South Korea are adopting to make 4-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips. The bureau in a statement said that gate-all-around field-effect transistor
WIDENING THE FIELD: Human resources managers must drop prejudices regarding gender, appearance and age to find the best candidates, Micro Technology said The job market for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry remained tight this quarter, as hiring activity slowed from a record high last quarter, a survey released yesterday by online human resource firm 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) showed. Ongoing labor shortages have prompted local semiconductor firms to recruit more women and foreigners in Taiwan and in Southeast Asia, the job bank said. The talent gap in the first quarter reached 35,000 people per month, a surge of 39.8 percent from the same period last year, as the contactless economy and digital transformation shore up demand for semiconductors, 104 Job Bank said in its annual report
POSITIVE CULTURE: Pursuing 12-inch wafers earlier than peers helped TSMC lead the industry, said a former executive, whose main regret was working for SMIC in China Corporate culture at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is what made the chipmaker a leading player in the global industry, a former executive said in an interview with California’s Computer History Museum. “One of the really important reasons that TSMC succeeded” is the culture at the firm, where “if equipment went down at two o’clock in the morning, we just called an equipment engineer,” and the worker would not complain, said former TSMC joint chief operating officer Chiang Shan-yi (蔣尚義). “We didn’t really do anything special, anything great, but we didn’t make any major mistakes,” when compared with competitors, such
DISMAL OUTLOOK: A Citigroup analyst predicted firms face ‘the worst semiconductor downturn in at least a decade,’ due to inventory build and the potential of a recession Semiconductor stocks tumbled after Micron Technology Inc became the latest chipmaker to warn about slowing demand, triggering concern that the industry is heading into a painful downturn. In the US on Tuesday, the Philadelphia semiconductor index sank 4.6 percent, with all 30 members in the red, its biggest drop in about two months. In Asia, chip stocks from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to Samsung Electronics Co, SK Hynix Inc and Tokyo Electron Ltd slumped. Investors are growing increasingly skittish as the notoriously cyclical industry is hurtling toward a prolonged slump after years of widespread shortages that led to heavy
RSS