China Steel Corp (中鋼), Taiwan’s largest mill, said it intends to delay the maintenance of a furnace by about a month because of a steel shortage.
Regular repairs on its No. 1 furnace, which can produce 1.9 million tonnes of steel annually, will probably start in January instead of November or December, executive vice president Chung Lo-min (鍾樂民) said by telephone yesterday.
The plant will be shut for more than four months, he said.
China Steel, which has an annual capacity of 10 million tonnes, is delaying the stoppage as the economic recovery is boosting steel demand.
Taiwan’s economy could return to growth in the October-to-December period following five straight quarters of contraction, the government’s statistics bureau said last month.
“There’s a shortage in the market as demand seems to be improving,” Chung said from Kaohsiung, where the company is located.
China Steel’s unit, Dragon Steel Corp (中龍), intends to start its first furnace, which will be able to produce 2.5 million tonnes of steel a year, in February, Chung said last month.
The new furnace will help make up for a shortfall from the closure of its No. 1 furnace, he said yesterday, without elaborating.
China Steel fell 1 percent to NT$30.65 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
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