Taiwan had a surplus of US$11.82 billion in its balance of payments in the second quarter, widening a surplus of US$4.59 billion a year earlier, the central bank’s latest tallies released yesterday showed.
The second-quarter surplus contrasted with a US$12.89 billion surplus posted in the first quarter, the central bank said.
The balance of payments is used to measure a nation’s payment flow of goods, services and investment across borders.
In the second quarter, the current-account surplus rose 40.8 percent to US$9.92 billion from US$7.04 billion a year earlier on a deeper decline in imports than that in exports amid the global slump, the central bank said.
The surplus narrowed from a US$12.89 billion surplus in the first quarter, the bank said.
Exports contracted 31.9 percent between April and June, while imports plunged 37.2 percent, Dawn Chen (陳一端), deputy chief of the central bank’s economic research department, told a media briefing.
As for the financial account, the direct and portfolio investment posted a net outflow of US$800 million and US$1.1 billion respectively in the second quarter, which Chen attributed to a rising purchase of foreign mutual funds and bonds by local residents and insurance firms.
The surplus on the income account, which includes dividend payments, widened to US$2.49 billion from US$1.64 billion a year earlier because of less income from direct investment and bank interest amid worldwide interest rate cuts.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS