Stock prices of the nation's major computer memory chipmakers outperformed the main bourse yesterday amid speculation on further price rebounds.
This came after disruption at a Chinese plant belonging to the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker Hynix Semiconductor Inc, which could lead to an ease in a supply glut.
Shares of the nation’s biggest dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chipmaker, Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體), jumped 0.78 percent to NT$13 yesterday, better than the turbulent TAIEX index, which fell 2.43 percent.
South Korean Hynix yesterday said the 15-hour outage at a Chinese plant operated jointly with Numonyx, a joint venture with STmicroelectronics, Intel and Francisco Partners, would not have a major adverse effect as emergency power generation activated immediately.
The affected plant, located in Wuxi, southern China, makes 100,000 12-inch wafers of DRAM chips a month, accounting for about half of the Korean firm’s total DRAM chip output. Hynix also operates an 8-inch plant in Wuxi, making memory chips used in consumer electronics.
“Hynix’s power outage may affect one week’s worth of production,” Taipei-based market researcher DRAMeXchange Technology Inc (集邦科技) said in a statement yesterday.
DRAMeXchange said the output disruption greatly boosted the spot price of benchmark DDR2 1Gb 128Mx8, which jumped 1.21 percent to US$2 per unit yesterday following an almost five percent decline during the slow season last week.
Hynix said the outage on Monday was likely to result in a US$16million to US$18 million loss in sales. It would take about two days for the plant to resume normal operations, the chipmaker said.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc estimated that supply could be cut by 3 percent to 4 percent in the next one to two months.
Stock prices of the nation’s third-largest DRAM chip supplier ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) climbed 0.37 percent, while Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) was down 0.77 percent.
Separately, DRAMeXchange expected the contract price of DRAM chips to recover by an additional five percent to 10 percent in the second half of this month, helped by slower output expansion and early demand for back-to-school shopping season.
ADDITIONAL REPORT BY BLOOMBERG
SELL-OFF: Investors expect tariff-driven volatility as the local boarse reopens today, while analysts say government support and solid fundamentals would steady sentiment Local investors are bracing for a sharp market downturn today as the nation’s financial markets resume trading following a two-day closure for national holidays before the weekend, with sentiment rattled by US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff announcement. Trump’s unveiling of new “reciprocal tariffs” on Wednesday triggered a sell-off in global markets, with the FTSE Taiwan Index Futures — a benchmark for Taiwanese equities traded in Singapore — tumbling 9.2 percent over the past two sessions. Meanwhile, the American depositary receipts (ADRs) of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the most heavily weighted stock on the TAIEX, plunged 13.8 percent in
A wave of stop-loss selling and panic selling hit Taiwan's stock market at its opening today, with the weighted index plunging 2,086 points — a drop of more than 9.7 percent — marking the largest intraday point and percentage loss on record. The index bottomed out at 19,212.02, while futures were locked limit-down, with more than 1,000 stocks hitting their daily drop limit. Three heavyweight stocks — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (Foxconn, 鴻海精密) and MediaTek (聯發科) — hit their limit-down prices as soon as the market opened, falling to NT$848 (US$25.54), NT$138.5 and NT$1,295 respectively. TSMC's
ASML Holding NV, the sole producer of the most advanced machines used in semiconductor manufacturing, said geopolitical tensions are harming innovation a day after US President Donald Trump levied massive tariffs that promise to disrupt trade flows across the entire world. “Our industry has been built basically on the ability of people to work together, to innovate together,” ASML chief executive officer Christophe Fouquet said in a recorded message at a Thursday industry event in the Netherlands. Export controls and increasing geopolitical tensions challenge that collaboration, he said, without specifically addressing the new US tariffs. Tech executives in the EU, which is
In a small town in Paraguay, a showdown is brewing between traditional producers of yerba mate, a bitter herbal tea popular across South America, and miners of a shinier treasure: gold. A rush for the precious metal is pitting mate growers and indigenous groups against the expanding operations of small-scale miners who, until recently, were their neighbors, not nemeses. “They [the miners] have destroyed everything... The canals, springs, swamps,” said Vidal Britez, president of the Yerba Mate Producers’ Association of the town of Paso Yobai, about 210km east of capital Asuncion. “You can see the pollution from the dead fish.
RSS