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 the speed cryptocurrency is emerging as the millennial generation’s alternative asset of choice in India, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago a couple of blockchain pioneers were briefly in police custody. Sathvik Vishwanath and Harish BV, cofounders of a then five-year-old start-up, were arrested in late 2018. No, they had not pulled off a shady initial coin offering. Their “crime” was that they put up a kiosk in a mall in Bangalore where customers could swap bitcoin, ether or ripple for cash or vice versa. That was the whole point of unocoin, their crypto token exchange.
FIVE NEW FABS: An acquisition of Siltronic would boost GlobalWafers’ market share from 17 to 30 percent, easily surpassing Japanese rival Sumco’s 25 percent GlobalWafers Inc (環球晶圓) yesterday said it is in final talks to acquire Germany-based Siltronic AG in a 3.75 billion euro (US$4.5 billion) deal, which might help it compete with its closest rival Sumco Corp of Japan. The acquisition would be the fifth for GlobalWafers since 2008, as it has grown to become the world’s No. 3 supplier of silicon wafers through such deals. GlobalWafers, which has a 17 percent market share, would see its market position greatly elevated to 30 percent when combined with Siltronic’s 13 percent, according to a presentation Siltronic gave to its investors at a quarterly conference in August. Sumco
A Chinese factory owned by South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix Inc yesterday halted operations after a plant worker was found to have an asymptomatic infection of COVID-19, Xinhua news agency reported. The South Korean worker based at the plant in Chongqing since February had departed on Thursday for South Korea, Xinhua reported. He was tested at Incheon Airport in Seoul and confirmed positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, it reported. All factory staff as well as staff and recent guests at the hotel where the worker lived have been isolated and given nucleic acid tests, the agency said. “We’re cooperating with the local government
A year of crisis for the lira has kept people in Turkey buying gold at a record pace. Now the appetite for more bullion risks becoming a drag on the currency just as a rally struggles to regain momentum. In the two weeks after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cleared out the leadership ranks blamed for failing to stabilize the lira and draining reserves, Turkish retail investors and firms added US$2.2 billion to their gold holdings, taking them to US$36.4 billion, or almost triple the total last year, Turkish central bank data showed. People are not relenting in their zeal to own
RSS