EQUITIES
TAIEX rallies to day’s high
Local shares yesterday staged a conspicuous rebound to finish at the session’s high, led by electronics and financial shares. The TAIEX closed up 182.63 points, or 1.71 percent, at 10,836.91, recovering the five-day moving average of 10,744 and the yearly moving average of 10,716, on turnover of NT$139.691 billion (US$4.58 billion). Although fears of a trade war between the US and China have not fully dispersed, analysts said local shares rallied in reflection of the lowered tension as long as the US refrains from triggering new unease. The stock market is expected to stay stable and gradually climb due to relatively thin trade at a time when foreign institutional investors have started to walk away from the trading floor with the start of the summer break.
BANKING
TBB forecasts improvement
State-run Taiwan Business Bank (TBB, 台灣企銀) expects performance to improve this quarter and continue growing in the next two quarters, chairman James Shih (施建安) told an annual general meeting yesterday, adding that he expects the company’s stock price to soon rise above the face value of NT$10 per share with book value of NT$13.28 per share. TBB shares yesterday closed at NT$9.41 in Taipei trading. The company reported pretax profit of NT$0.49 per share in the first five months of this year. Last year, net profit totaled NT$5.04 billion, or NT$0.82 per share.
BANKING
OBU assets total US$203bn
The 60 offshore banking units (OBUs) of financial institutions operating in Taiwan had assets totaling US$203.156 billion as of the end of last month, down US$764 million, or 0.4 percent, from April, the central bank said in a statement yesterday. The OBUs of 37 local banks held US$180.86 billion in assets, while foreign banks’ 23 OBUs held US$22.296 billion, it said. At the end of last month, the primary uses of all OBUs’ funds were discounts and loans, amounting to US$82.142 billion, or 40.4 percent of total assets, it added.
SERVICES
Synnex to acquire Convergys
New York Stock Exchange-listed Synnex Corp, in which Taiwan’s Synnex Technology International Corp (聯強國際) has an interest, yesterday announced that it would acquire Convergys Corp and then integrate it with Concentrix, a wholly owned subsidiary and top global provider of customer relationship management and business process outsourcing services. The Fremont, California-based firm said it has reached a definitive agreement with Convergys, but did not disclose financial terms. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this calendar year, subject to the approval of shareholders of both companies, regulatory requirements and customary closing conditions, the company said in a statement.
ELECTRONICS
CCIS warns of overreliance
Six of Taiwan’s top 10 corporations by net revenue are electronics companies that are part of Apple Inc’s supply chain, resulting in an overreliance on the US company, a China Credit Information Service (CCIS, 中華徵信所) report said on Thursday. Total revenue for the six enterprises, including Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), increased from NT$34.7542 trillion in 2016 to a record high of NT$36.1433 trillion last year, the report said.
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) plans to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip in the first quarter of next year, even as it struggles to make enough chips due to US restrictions, two people familiar with the matter said. The telecoms conglomerate has sent samples of the Ascend 910C — its newest chip, meant to rival those made by US chipmaker Nvidia Corp — to some technology firms and started taking orders, the sources told Reuters. The 910C is being made by top Chinese contract chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) on its N+2 process, but a lack
NVIDIA PLATFORM: Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and a Taiwan site is to enter production next month, Nvidia wrote on its blog Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer, yesterday said it is expanding production capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) servers based on Nvidia Corp’s Blackwell chips in Taiwan, the US and Mexico to cope with rising demand. Hon Hai’s new AI-enabled factories are to use Nvidia’s Omnivores platform to create 3D digital twins to plan and simulate automated production lines at a factory in Hsinchu, the company said in a statement. Nvidia’s Omnivores platform is for developing industrial AI simulation applications and helps bring facilities online faster. Hon Hai’s Mexican facility is to begin production early next year and the
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