The TAIEX early yesterday hit an all-time intraday high on the back of soaring Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) shares, before tumbling back to the previous day’s close as the contract chipmaker could not single-handedly prop up the index.
The TAIEX rose more than 400 points in the first 20 minutes of trading to hit a record 13,031.7 points, but later pared its gains to close down 0.01 percent at 12,586.73.
Turnover was NT$343.252 billion (US$11.63 billion), the highest in the Taiwan Stock Exchange’s history.
Photo: Bloomberg / I-Hwa Cheng
TSMC continued to dictate the market’s direction, as its early surge by the daily maximum 10 percent to NT$466.5 accounted for more than 350 points of the TAIEX’s early gains.
The company also vaulted into the world’s top 10 firms in terms of market capitalization, ahead of Johnson & Johnson and Visa Inc.
TSMC shares later retreated, closing up 2.47 percent at NT$435, which still represented a 39 percent gain this month.
Its gains kept the TAIEX from falling steeply, after contributing 327 points to the benchmark index a day earlier, when the overall index rose 284.26 points.
“TSMC’s one-stock show has been rarely seen in decades,” Shin Kong Investment Trust Co (新光投信) chairman Quincy Liu (劉坤錫) said.
“The broader market has been held together by TSMC the past two days. Yesterday, MediaTek Inc (聯發科) helped out, and today support was seen from LED, Apple Inc-concept and bicycle stocks, which is a healthier trend than yesterday,” Liu said.
The TAIEX rose 2.31 percent on Monday, despite 763 stocks falling and 150 stocks rising.
“With every NT$1 increase in TSMC equaling an 8.5-point increase in the TAIEX, TSMC has accounted for about 90 percent of the index’s gains in the past two days,” Liu said.
Among other gainers in the Apple supply chain, iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) rose 0.5 percent to NT$78.4 and smartphone camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co (大立光) gained 2.49 percent to NT$3,910.
Several other electronics stocks could not stay in positive territory.
MediaTek ended down 6.59 percent at NT$680 after a 4 percent rise earlier, Marketech International Corp (帆宣) plummeted 7.57 percent to NT$116 to erase an earlier gain of 9 percent and Yageo Corp (國巨) fell 5.42 percent to NT$384, off a high of NT$420.
Liu said that TSMC’s success is due to its favorable position in a world where China is “de-Americanizing” and other countries are distancing themselves from China.
“TSMC’s ability to make high-end chips for artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and smart manufacturing applications in the 5G era gives it an invaluable role, allowing it to benefit from both the ‘de-Americanization’ and ‘de-Sinicization’ trends,” Liu said.
Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰), a manager at Cathay Futures Corp (國泰期貨), said the TAIEX’s rally has come to an end for the time being.
He said he expects the market to remain turbulent in the short term, but remains bullish regarding medium and long-term prospects.
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass