Taiwanese shares closed higher yesterday as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a record high on reports that the contract chipmaker would raise prices for its advanced chips, even as China staged military exercises near the nation.
The TAIEX ended up 254.87 points, or 0.89 percent, at 28,810.89. Turnover on the local main board totaled NT$439.098 billion (US$13.96 billion), Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
The Chinese military moved army, naval, air force and artillery units around Taiwan for its “Justice Mission 2025” drills, while Taiwan placed its forces on alert and called the Beijing government “the biggest destroyer of peace.”
Photo: CNA
TSMC benefited from optimism over its sales prospects after local media reported that the chipmaker would raise prices for its high-end chips starting next year, due to tight global supply. The stock rose 1.32 percent to close at a record NT$1,530.
“If speculation about price hikes proves true, TSMC will likely continue to post strong sales growth next year, so investors should watch its guidance closely,” Concord Securities Co (康和證券) analyst Kerry Huang (黃志祺) said.
TSMC is scheduled to hold an investor conference on Jan. 15 to provide guidance for next year. The company has forecast that its sales for this year would grow nearly 35 percent in US dollar terms.
“As market liquidity remains ample, the TAIEX is likely to challenge the 29,000-point level by the end of the year,” Huang said.
Meanwhile, the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong gave up early gains, falling 0.7 percent to 25,637.69, while the Shanghai Composite Index remained virtually unchanged at 3,965.28.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index slipped 0.4 percent to 50,526.92.
In South Korea, the KOSPI jumped 2.2 percent to 4,220.56, less than 2 points away from its record high early last month, but on pace for its best year since 1999. A 6.8 percent jump in SK Hynix Inc due to a regulatory change that lifted an investment warning for its stock helped boost the benchmark. Samsung Electronics Co also advanced 2.1 percent.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gave up 0.4 percent to 8,725.70.
Meanwhile, gold dropped 1.1 percent to US$4,484 an ounce, but stayed on track for its biggest annual gain since 1979, with a rise of more than 70 percent. Silver climbed above the US$80 mark per ounce for the first time in volatile trading before dropping back to US$76.14.
Saxo Markets chief investment strategist Charu Chanana said precious metals have been lifted this year by a mix of rate cut tailwinds, and hedging against geopolitical and fiscal uncertainty.
Three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange was 3.27 percent higher at US$12,560 per tonne, having set a record high of US$12,960 earlier yesterday.
Additional reporting by AP and Reuters
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS