Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac-turing Co (TSMC,
Shares in TSMC, the biggest maker of chips for brand-name companies, fell 2.8 percent to NT$52.5, the lowest since May 21, 1999. UMC, the second-largest, dropped 3.3 percent to NT$31.2, the lowest since March 6, 1999.
Chartered Semiconductor Manu-facturing Ltd (特許), the third-largest, fell as much as S$0.18, or 5 percent, to S$3.38. The shares were close to the S$3.42 price when Chartered shares listed on Oct. 29, 1999.
A global slump in demand has idled about two-thirds of production capacity at TSMC and UMC. Chartered said that about 80 percent of its capacity will go unused during the current quarter.
The attacks in the US have pushed a possible recovery to as late as the end of 2002, investors said.
"Their valuation has been dragged further down," said Pedro Tai, who counts TSMC and UMC shares among the US$2.5 billion of equities he helps manage at HSBC Asset Management Taiwan. "A global recovery may be delayed for at least two more quarters." Other technology companies in Asia are also close to two-year lows.
In Japan, shares of Mitsubishi Electric Corp recovered after falling to a two-year low last week. The shares rose as much as ?2, or a half percent, to ?443 after the company said it will sack 1,000 more employees at a chip unit. Last week, the company said it would fire a similar number of staff.
"A pick-up in the chip market won't come until October 2002 at the earliest," said Koichi Nagasawa, an executive vice president at the company.
In related news, the head of UMC said manufacturers worldwide may see losses if China decides to build more semiconductor plants.
"Each major city in China has very aggressive plans to build up fabs -- they are talking about 10 to a dozen in the next five years," said Chairman Robert Tsao (曹興誠). "If they achieve the goal, it will be complete chaos -- a majority of players will lose a lot of money." There are more than 100 fabs or chip-manufacturing plants in the world and 60 percent of them are "doing nothing," said Tsao while speaking at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Singapore.
UMC said it expects to use only 30 percent of its plant equipment in the third quarter.
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