Electronics leads index’s fall
Taiwanese shares closed 2.4 percent lower yesterday, led by a sharp fall in electronics stocks, dealers said.
The weighted index lost 109.53 points to close at 4,466.42 on turnover of NT$79.96 billion (US$2.35 billion).
Losers led gainers 1,254 to 362, with 167 stocks unchanged.
“The market consolidated as investors waited cautiously for the fallout from negative company news,” Johnny Lee of President Securities (統一證券) said.
Memory chipmakers ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德科技) and Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶半導體) closed limit-down at NT$1.48 and NT$3.83 respectively.
The unprofitable ProMOS came under pressure after four local banks said they planned to redeem NT$11 billion in overseas convertible bonds it had issued.
Low-power DDR2 launched
Micron Technology Inc and Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) yesterday introduced their jointly developed low-power DDR2 (LPDDR2) DRAM technology for mobile and consumer applications with initial die capacities of up to 1GB.
“LPDDR2 DRAM is important for the design of today’s mobile applications, prolonging a device’s battery life with its low-power consumption and improvement of overall system performance compared to low-power DDR1,” John Schreck, vice president of DRAM design at Micron, said in a joint statement issued by the companies.
Schreck said Micron would continue working with Nanya to bring industry-leading DRAM design to customers.
As a new player in the low-power DRAM market, Nanya hopes the latest development can help it meet the future needs of the mobile world through its solid partnership with Micron.
“The technical success of the jointly developed LPDDR2 design is a testament to the two major DRAM suppliers’ synergy, with their commitment to serving customers with leading technologies and designs,” Nanya senior vice president Joe Ting (丁達剛) said in the statement.
Evergreen to hike rates
Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) said yesterday it planned to hike freight rates on its Asia-Europe routes from April 1, and may hike them again this year as current rates are below break-even levels, the Chinese-language online business news outlet Cnyes.com reported yesterday, citing Evergreen Marine chairman Arnold Wang (王龍雄).
Evergreen Marine is the operator of Asia’s largest container shipping line and Taiwan’s largest container shipping firm by revenue.
The company may increase rates by up to US$300 per twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in April and further hike rates in June and August, Wang said at a press gathering in Taipei, the Web site said.
Freight rates on Asia-Europe routes, which are negotiated quarterly, are now down as much as US$500 to US$600 per TEU from the fourth quarter.
Current rates on these routes are around US$850/TEU, with the break-even rate estimated at US$1,100/TEU.
TCL’s LCD TV sales surge
TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings Ltd (TCL, 多媒體控股), the TV unit of China’s biggest consumer electronics maker, said that sales of liquid-crystal-display sets last month almost tripled from a year ago.
The company sold 557,984 LCD TVs last month, a rise of 177 percent from a year earlier, TCL said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Sales of cathode-ray tube TVs fell 63 percent to 557,343 sets, it said. The total number of TV sets sold last month fell 35 percent from a year earlier, TCL said.
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
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
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
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