The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month edged down 0.3 points to 46.8, falling for nine straight months, as companies remained cautious in the face of economic uncertainty, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday.
“Most constituents of the index moved by less than 1 point,” virtually unchanged from the previous month,” CIER president Yeh Chun-hsien (葉俊顯) told reporters.
PMI data aspire to capture the manufacturing industry’s health, with values of 50 and higher indicating expansion and scores lower than the threshold suggesting contraction.
Photo: Hsu Tzu-ling, Taipei Times
Although companies are still looking for clearer signs of a recovery, they are less pessimistic about business prospects in the coming six months, Yeh said.
The critical subindex of new business orders edged up 0.3 points to 48.6, closer to the neutral mark, as companies in the biotechnology, food and textile, as well as raw materials, saw business pick up, while other sectors remained weighed down by tepid end-market demand, CIER’s monthly survey found.
The reading on industrial production lost 1.2 points to 48.2, as some manufacturers cut capacity to save on operating costs. As a result, the employment measure dropped a mild 0.7 points to 47.9, the institute said.
The subindex on inventory declined an insignificant 0.1 points, while the measure on clients’ inventory fell 3.1 points to 41.6, reflecting a conservative and frugal attitude, the Taipei-based think tank said.
Although the worst is likely over, a concrete recovery remains elusive in terms of order visibility and other PMI data, Yeh said.
The value for the six-month business outlook gained 2.7 points to 42.5, it said.
Yeh attributed the sentiment uptick to China’s announcement of stimulus measures to bolster infrastructure, which would benefit local firms focused on the Chinese market.
The S&P Global Taiwan Manufacturing PMI reached similar observations, coming in at 48.3 last month from 47.6 in October.
The downturn in Taiwan’s manufacturing sector continued to ease, as companies exercised caution when making purchases to grapple with muted demand, S&P economics associate director Annabel Fiddes said, adding that the subdued demand placed a lid on price hikes for the time being, although inflationary pressures returned.
The nation’s non-manufacturers fared better with the non-manufacturing index (NMI) gaining 3 points to 56.2, the highest since August last year and expanding for 13 consecutive months, the institute said.
The tourism and hospitality sectors are looking forward to seasonally high sales linked to traditional year-end feasts and employee travel for the first time in four years without COVID-19 disruptions, Yeh said.
The TAIEX’s rally further shored up businesses for fund management and securities houses, the institute said.
Apple Inc has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the start-up’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence (AI) features to its devices, people familiar with the matter said. The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc’s Google about licensing its Gemini chatbot. Those discussions have not led to an agreement, but are ongoing. An OpenAI
ASML Holding NV’s new advanced chip machines have a daunting price tag, said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), one of the Dutch company’s biggest clients. “The cost is very high,” TSMC senior vice president Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, referring to ASML’s latest system known as high-NA extreme ultraviolet (EUV). “I like the high-NA EUV’s capability, but I don’t like the sticker price,” Zhang said. ASML’s new chip machine can imprint semiconductors with lines that are just 8 nanometers thick — 1.7 times smaller than the previous generation. The machines cost 350 million euros (US$378 million)
INSATIABLE: Almost all AI innovators are working with the chipmaker to address the rapidly growing AI-related demand for energy-efficient computing power, the CEO said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported about 60 percent annual growth in revenue for last month, benefiting from rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing applications. Revenue last month expanded to NT$236.02 billion (US$7.28 billion), compared with NT$147.9 billion in April last year, the second-highest level in company history, TSMC said in a statement. On a monthly basis, revenue surged 20.9 percent, from NT$195.21 billion in March. As AI-related applications continue to show strong growth, TSMC expects revenue to expand about 27.6 percent year-on-year during the current quarter to between US$19.6 billion and US$20.4 billion. That would
‘FULL SUPPORT’: Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said he hopes more companies would settle in the prefecture to create an area similar to Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park The newly elected governor of Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture said he is ready to ensure wide-ranging support to woo Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to build its third Japanese chip factory there. Concerns of groundwater shortages when TSMC’s two plants begin operations in the prefecture’s Kikuyo have spurred discussions about the possibility of tapping unused dam water, Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said in an interview on Saturday. While Kimura said talks about a third plant have yet to occur, Bloomberg had reported TSMC is already considering its third Japanese fab — also in Kumamoto — which would make more advanced chips. “We are