The New Taiwan dollar rose to its highest in almost 14 months on expectations domestic exporters will remit overseas earnings faster.
"Taiwanese exporters are bringing forward their conversion of US dollars into Taiwan dollars," boosting the country's currency, said Derrick Lee, an analyst at MCM Asia Pacific in Singapore.
The local currency rose NT$0.078 against its US counterpart to close at
NT$33.206 at the Taipei foreign exchange market, with a turnover totalling US$455 million, compared with last Friday's 524 million.
The local currency has been helped by the rising yen, which prevent Japanese exporters from gaining a pricing advantage in overseas markets. The yen rose to its highest against the US dollar in almost 10 months.
Gains may be limited as the central bank will probably sell its currency to prevent its 5.3 percent advance this year from slowing overseas sales, which rose faster than expected in June, climbing 9 percent from a year ago.
Taiwan's foreign-currency reserves rose for a 12th month in June, climbing 6 percent from May to $148.2 billion.
"As evident from the rise in Taiwan's reserves over the past few months, it's very obvious that the central bank has been buying a lot of US dollars," Lee said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
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