The nation’s consumer price index (CPI) increased 2.03 percent year-on-year last month, mainly due to increases in food and fruit prices, as well as dining-out costs, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
It was the second consecutive month that the nation’s CPI surpassed the central bank’s 2 percent target, but the inflationary gauge decelerated from the previous month’s 2.32 percent, the agency’s data showed.
Food prices rose 4.34 percent annually, with the costs of fruit growing 25.26 percent. Meat prices rose 4.46 percent, and those for cereal products such as bread and cakes grew 3.38 percent, the agency said in a report.
Photo: CNA
Dining-out costs grew 3.48 percent from a year earlier, above the 3 percent mark for more than six consecutive months and the highest increase over the past 13 months, the agency said.
As Taiwanese prefer eating out, this still-high spending renders a public perception that consumer prices are still rising, it added.
On a positive note, transportation and communications prices dropped 0.76 percent from a year earlier on the back of a 3.74 percent decrease in international energy prices and a 2.13 percent price fall in communication fees, while rents increased 2.4 percent year-on-year, the smallest increase in the past 12 months, the report said.
Still, inflation for households in the lowest 20 percent of income rose 2.26 percent last month, higher than the 2.09 percent for those with medium income and 1.88 percent for those with the highest 20 percent of income, DGBAS data showed.
Households with lower incomes felt the pinch of rising inflation as food costs comprise a larger share of spending, the agency said.
Core CPI, a more stable long-term price tracker that excludes price-volatile items such as vegetables and oil, last month increased 1.66 percent, below the 2 percent mark for 13 consecutive months, which the agency said was an indication that domestic prices remain stable.
In the first four months of this year, CPI grew 2.15 percent from the same period last year and cumulative core CPI rose 1.64 percent, the report said.
Meanwhile, the producer price index (PPI) last month rose 0.93 percent year-on-year, thanks to price increases in agricultural products, fuel and electronic components, the report said. In the first four months, the cumulative PPI grew 3.02 percent from the same period a year ago, it said.
The DGBAS said it sees no obvious risk of rising prices in Taiwan in the short term due to the US tariff policy and expects the recent surge in the New Taiwan dollar to affect import prices, but the effect on the CPI is expected to emerge in one to two quarters, the agency said.
It is possible that CPI growth would be below 2 percent this month in light of the recent fall in international crude oil prices, it added.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS