CSBC posts higher revenue
CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台船), the nation’s leading shipbuilder, yesterday reported NT$4.01 billion (US$115.41 million) in revenue last month, a 93.15 percent increase from a year ago, because the firm was ahead of schedule in deliveries of ships to its clients, company spokesman Wang Ko-hsuan (王克旋) said.
Wang said CSBC would finish delivering three new ships this month and that it had orders for 58 container ships and 30 military speed boats, at a total cost of NT$120 billion, for completion by October 2012.
Kaohsiung-based CSBC’s major clients include Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp (陽明海運), Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運), as well as shipping firms in Germany, Japan and South Korea.
Employees return to work
The number of workers on unpaid leave at two of the nation’s science parks has been decreasing significantly since the beginning of this year, statistics provided by the Science Park Administration showed yesterday.
The Central Taiwan Science Park (中部科學園區) said the percentage of workers taking unpaid leave had fallen to 45 percent this month from 70 percent in January, saying the photonics industry had particularly benefited from China’s recent program subsidizing home appliance purchases in rural areas and it had received a massive increase in orders.
The Southern Taiwan Science Park (南部科學園區) also saw the number of workers on unpaid leave fall to 11,000 at the end of last month, from 15,000 at the end of last year.
China Steel sales down
China Steel Corp (中鋼), the nation’s largest steelmaker, said sales fell 26 percent last month compared with the year earlier.
Sales dropped to NT$12.4 billion, the Kaohsiung-based company said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday, without giving a comparative figure.
HTC sees rebound this month
HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s largest maker of handsets using Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system, said sales would rebound this month after hitting a low point.
“Monthly revenues bottomed out in February and we expect sales to pick up in March,” the Taoyuan-based company said in a statement yesterday.
Year-to-date sales up to the end of last month declined 11 percent to NT$19.2 billion, it said.
Kaohsiung seeing less cargo
The port of Kaohsiung’s container-handling volume recorded a year-on-year decline for the fourth consecutive month in January, mainly because of the severe global economic downturn, statistics released yesterday by the Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau showed.
The volume of containers handled by the port totaled 619,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) for the month, down 28 percent compared with the 867,000 TEU handled in January last year.
Harbor master Tsai Ting-yi (蔡丁義) said volume began declining precipitously in the fourth quarter of last year, with a year-on-year decrease of more than 10 percent recorded in October and more than 24 percent in November and December.
CAL shuffles China flights
China Airlines (CAL, 華航) will increase its number of flights between Taiwan and Hangzhou, China, from three charter flights a week to four, a CAL executive stationed in Shanghai said yesterday.
With more tourists from Hangzhou visiting Taiwan, CAL said it decided to switch one of its charter flights on the Taiwan-Shenzhen route to the Taiwan-Hangzhou route.
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
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
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
RSS