Local commercial and luxury-home properties could enjoy a big upside should further political liberalization occur and the local economy get a boost from closer trade ties with China, a real-estate consultancy firm said yesterday.
“It is likely that prices for office space in Taipei will soon go up as the vacancy rate tightens,” Billy Yen (顏炳立), general manager of real-estate consultancy DTZ (戴德梁行), told a seminar.
Luxury homes could further benefit as unit prices, which average NT$1.6 million (US$52,400) per ping (3.3m²) in the upscale Xinyi District have underperformed in comparison with luxury residential properties in major Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, he said.
DTZ is the organizer of an auction tomorrow to collateralize the Agora Garden (亞太會館) hotel at a floor price of NT$14.9 billion.
Yen was pessimistic about the residential property market, except for those in Taipei, which could become defensive amid any potential property slump.
He said residential prices outside Taipei had gone up to an unreasonable level.
He rejected the likelihood that the local property market was experiencing a bubble and could collapse when the bubble bursts. He said foreign investors still think that the local property market’s growth momentum remains strong and prices are still low.
A report by Collier International, however, said office building prices had gone up so much that it had scared away potential buyers or office tenants, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported yesterday.
The report forecast the vacancy rate for the office building market could climb back up to exceed 10 percent this year from last year’s 9.47 percent, the paper said.
Meanwhile, statistics released by the central bank yesterday showed that the property market may be showing signs of weakening. Loans for construction have dropped for a second straight month to NT$1.018 trillion last month, tallies showed.
The NT$8.65 billion, or 0.85 percent, decline in such loans — which mostly include loans to construction companies for housing projects and land development — in April from the previous month has accelerated from a monthly decline of NT$2.07 billion, or 0.21 percent, in March, data showed.
The central bank’s latest data also indicated weakening consumer loans in other categories. Car loans presented a continual decline since July 2006 and fell to NT$81.21 billion last month, a reduction of NT$1.8 billion, or 2.18 percent, from the previous month.
Meanwhile, revolving credit for credit cards totaled NT$251.9 billion last month, which posed a monthly decline since the peak of NT$465.6 billion in December 2005, tallies showed.
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,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS