Taiwan can outperform Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai to become a regional financial hub if the local bourse manages to attract listings from Chinese companies, analysts said yesterday.
“If small and medium-sized Chinese companies can be listed [on the Taiwan Stock Exchange], Taiwan will definitely be attractive to most Chinese-speaking companies and [the bourse] would become the NASDAQ of Asia,” Polaris Securities Co (寶來證券) vice chairman Huang Chi-yuan (黃齊元) told a seminar in Taipei yesterday. “Taiwan is now an undervalued equity.”
Huang said Array Inc (安瑞科技), which was listed on the GRETAI Securities Market on Wednesday, was one of the first Chinese-owned technology companies to test the waters in the local bourse.
Taiwan should also take advantage of its newly won “peace dividends” from growing ties with China and transform itself into a management hub for multinationals, a regional talent incubator and an experimental house for financial innovative capabilities in the region, he added.
Du Ying-tzyong (杜英宗), chairman of Citibank Taiwan’s global investment banking in the Asia-Pacific region, said at the seminar that Taiwan should in the near term consider cooperation with the Shanghai stock exchange on dual listings of public companies, which is “a more feasible” way to strengthen the local capital market.
Du said he was less optimistic about Shanghai’s goal of becoming a regional financial hub by 2020, since China’s society was not open enough and lacked financial transparency and rule of law.
Following a recent rally on the TAIEX weighted index, both Du and Huang yesterday warned that the nation’s economic fundamentals in the second half of the year remained opaque, which could be bad news in terms of the local bourse’s future momentum, despite accelerated cross-strait trade links.
“The recent rally is purely a result of ample liquidity,” Du said. “Without a bolster from solid economic fundamentals, the TAIEX’s prospects in the second half may not be promising.”
Du and Huang agreed that after Morgan Stanley Capital International this week increased its weighting of Taiwanese shares in its equity indexes, a capital inflow of between NT$200 billion (US$6 billion) and NT$600 billion on the local bourse was likely in the near future.
Du urged the domestic banking sector to accelerate its consolidation.
He advised the government to encourage mergers and acquisitions between state-run banks while enticing private financial institutions to assimilate private rivals.
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
‘SACRED MOUNTAIN’: The chipmaker can form joint ventures abroad, except in China, but like other firms, it needs government approval for large investments Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) needs government permission for any overseas joint ventures (JVs), but there are no restrictions on making the most advanced chips overseas other than for China, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. US media have said that TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to companies such as Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp, has been in talks for a stake in Intel Corp. Neither company has confirmed the talks, but US President Donald Trump has accused Taiwan of taking away the US’ semiconductor business and said he wants the industry back
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
RSS