Commercial property deals totaled NT$28.7 billion (US$882.29 million) last quarter, slumping 37 percent year-on-year, as global economic uncertainty and lingering credit controls in Taiwan chilled the market, Colliers International Taiwan (高力國際) said yesterday.
“Unclear US tariff policies are driving manufacturers to reassess their global presence and production base locations, with the possibility of postponing expansion or investment plans,” Colliers Taiwan senior research director Eilleen Liang (梁儀盈) said.
Owner-occupiers underpinned commercial real-estate deals during the January-to-March period, as companies such as Uni-President Group (統一企業), Micron Taiwan (美光), ASMedia Technology Inc (祥碩科技) and Wendell Industrial Co (穩得) bought properties to bolster their operations, the company said.
Photo: CNA
Micron Taiwan has purchased its third property for self-occupancy since August last year, it said.
Demand for capacity expansion and workspace upgrades was a key driver of factory and industrial office transactions, explaining why firms from the electronics, integrated circuit design and semiconductor sectors purchased properties, the company said.
As a result, factories and logistics warehouses were the most sought-after, accounting for NT$12 billion of deals, followed by industrial offices at NT$9.2 billion, it said.
Meanwhile, investment-focused activity was quiet, with no transactions from domestic life insurance companies at all, it said, adding that financial regulators had lowered the minimum return.
As for land deals, major Taiwanese developers continued to acquire land in popular locations, especially in southern Taiwan, the company said.
Farglory Land Development Co (遠雄建設) spent NT$13.6 billion to build up land stock in Kaohsiung, while JSL Group (甲山林) acquired land and old idle factories for development, it said.
Looking ahead, Colliers Taiwan said property investors should take time to re-evaluate their portfolios and bolster their resilience in dealing with market direction shifts.
As borrowing costs remain high, owner-occupiers would continue to dominate transactions of factories and industrial offices, the company said.
Companies would cautiously approach expansion plans and slow the decisionmaking process, which is unfavorable for property transactions, it said.
The central bank last month cut its forecast for the nation’s GDP growth to 3.05 percent for this year, and growing uncertainty linked to US tariffs might merit further revisions, the company said.
The US trade policy is rattling consumer and property market confidence across the world and would weigh on property investment in Taiwan, it said.
In related developments, construction loans last month stood at NT$3.43 trillion, or a 2.97 percent rise from a year earlier, marking the slowest advance since August last year, the central bank said yesterday.
The slowdown has to do with developers’ conservative attitude in dealing with the central bank’s credit controls, it added.
Likewise, house loans picked up from the lowest pace of 9.34 percent in nearly a year to NT$11.18 billion, as credit controls drove some buyers to the sidelines, it said.
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,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS