The government’s tax revenue last month shrank 2.8 percent annually to NT$131.4 billion (US$4.27 billion), dragged by sharp retreats in revenue from securities transactions and land value incremental tax, the Ministry of Finance said on Wednesday.
The decline came as economic weakness, market volatility and interest rate hikes cooled investment interest, the ministry said.
The ministry collected NT$12.4 billion of securities transaction tax, a 19.1 percent decline from the same period last year, as ongoing global economic weakness drove investors to the sidelines, statistics official Liang Kuan-shuan (梁冠璇) told an online media briefing.
Photo: CNA
The conservative sentiment explains why combined daily turnover on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange fell 9.5 percent year-on-year to NT$289.6 billion last month, Liang said.
Major Taiwanese tech firms recently gave lackluster earnings guidance for this quarter, due to poor order visibility, as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and people cut spending on technology gadgets in favor of in-person experiences.
Cumulative securities transaction tax revenue in the first four months tumbled 25.2 percent to NT$49 billion, the steepest retreat since 2010, Liang said.
However, she said securities transaction tax revenue could still meet the ministry’s target for this year, adding that the decline in daily turnover has tapered off and has exceeded expectations this month.
Land value incremental tax revenue plunged 34.5 percent year-on-year to NT$5.2 billion after the number of taxable cases dropped 26.9 percent to 38,608, the ministry said.
Unfavorable policy measures — mainly interest rate hikes and bans on transfers of presale house purchase agreements — scared away investors, leaving people with real demand to underpin the market, Liang said.
Other property-related tax items, such as deed tax and combined property tax, also fell by double-digit percentage points, affirming a downcycle, she said.
For the first four months, land value incremental tax revenue fell 37.6 percent to NT$22.8 billion, consistent with a 25.3 percent decline in the number of taxable cases to 56,558, the ministry said.
Other tax categories proved resilient. Personal income tax revenue grew 12 percent to NT$36.9 billion and could increase further this month, when Taiwanese file income taxes for last year’s salary and interest income, cash dividends and other compensation.
Sales tax revenue rose 9.2 percent to NT$14.1 billion, thanks to a considerable increase in vehicle imports, the ministry said.
Cumulative tax revenue in the first four months totaled NT$618.5 billion, up a fractional 0.1 percent from the same period last year and ahead of the government’s budget schedule by 10.4 percent, it said.
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
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
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li