The Singapore Exchange (SGX) welcomes Taiwanese companies to list on its mainboard and newly transformed second board, Cata-list, an exchange official said in Taipei yesterday.
"Singapore is the most internationalized market in Asia [and] can serve Taiwanese businesses as a highly effective platform for raising capital," Lawrence Wong (黃良穎), an SGX executive vice president, told a media briefing yesterday.
Wong said that the Singapore Exchange, established in 1999, was a fast-growing market with 757 publicly listed companies and a market capitalization of US$467 billion as of January.
Nearly 38 percent of the city-state's listed companies are foreign firms, including 138 firms from China, 54 from Hong Kong, 53 from other Southeast Asian states and 19 from Taiwan.
Wong said SGX was particularly interested in wooing "fast-growing" Taiwanese companies to list on its second board, Catalist, where listings can be facilitated in five to six weeks -- compared with 12 to 18 weeks for the mainboard.
Catalist, formerly known as SESDAQ, has no financial and operational thresholds for listing, Wong said, adding that the only requirement is an endorsement from one of the applicant's appointed sponsors.
Singapore may be famous as one of the region's financial hubs, but the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) is still the best choice for Taiwanese companies, more so if the government could scrap restrictions on capital flow, said Hwang Min-juh (
"The 40 percent capital cap on publicly traded Taiwanese companies investing in China is the only reason for them to list elsewhere, such as Hong Kong and Singapore," said Hwang, who is also chairman of SinoPac Securities Corp (
Taiwan bans listed companies from investing more than 40 percent of their capital in China.
Companies seeking to succeed in Singapore must be familiar with the market there and have a highly recognizable brand name or reputation to attract local investors -- half of which are institutional investors, he said, adding that the TSE outpaces the SGX in terms of daily turnover.
Wong said two Taiwanese firms had recently exited the SGX, including Want Want Corp (
The TSE is also actively courting Taiwanese firms based overseas to list on the local bourse.
The local exchange sponsored a "2008 Taiwanese Enterprises Symposium," hosted by its chairman Wu Rong-i (吳榮義), in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where Taiwanese companies are among the leading manufacturers with investments totaling more than US$10 billion.
Wu said he believed the TSE would outperform its Asian peers once listing restrictions were further eased and the political uncertainty associated with the presidential election was cleared up.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) quarterly sales topped estimates, reinforcing investor hopes that the torrid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware spending would extend into this year. The go-to chipmaker for Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc reported a 39 percent rise in December-quarter revenue to NT$868.5 billion (US$26.35 billion), based on calculations from monthly disclosures. That compared with an average estimate of NT$854.7 billion. The strong showing from Taiwan’s largest company bolsters expectations that big tech companies from Alphabet Inc to Microsoft Corp would continue to build and upgrade datacenters at a rapid clip to propel AI development. Growth accelerated for
RSS