The TAIEX yesterday rallied 0.79 percent, or 124.67 points, to 15,929.43, as cooling inflation in the US fed hope for interest rate hike pauses, overriding concerns over the National Stabilization Fund’s decision to exit the market, officials and analysts said.
The local bourse took cues from Wall Street, where investors breathed a sigh of relief after the US producers’ price index last month declined 0.5 percent from February and grew a weaker-than-expected 2.7 percent year-on-year, making further rate hikes unnecessary.
Deputy Minister of Finance Frank Juan (阮清華), who is executive secretary of the National Stabilization Fund, said there is no need to worry about the fund’s exit, which would be done gradually to limit its impact.
Photo: CNA
The government in July last year activated NT$500 billion (US$16.41 billion) of the fund to shore up local shares that took a hard hit amid drastic interest rate hikes by major central banks to combat steep inflation.
“The rally [yesterday] confirmed the health of local shares and investors should have confidence,” Juan told reporters on the sidelines of a public function.
The National Stabilization Fund on Thursday said it would end its longest streak of intervention, during which the TAIEX gained 13.29 percent from 13,950 to 15,804.
The National Stabilization Fund was mostly inactive last quarter, Juan said.
It had spent NT$54.5 billion as of the end of last month to shore up local shares, generating more than NT$8 billion in unrealized gains, or a return of 13.01 percent, data showed.
“The fund has not spent extra money since the end of last year, indicating that the market has recovered on its own and the fund has served its purpose,” Juan said.
Turnover yesterday totaled NT$249.613 billion after foreign institutional players increased their combined stake by NT$14.91 billion, while proprietary dealers added NT$327 million, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
Mutual funds trimmed their combined net position by NT$676.41 million, the data showed.
Heavyweight players such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) closed up 1.18 percent at NT$516 ahead of its earnings conference on Thursday next week.
The increase reversed days of retreat after the world’s largest chip supplier on Monday released its first-quarter revenue, which missed its guidance, analysts said.
Tourism firms lent a helping hand after delivering combined revenue on par with business improvement expectations, analysts said.
Shares of Formosa International Hotels Corp (晶華國際酒店集團) grew 4.06 percent to NT$295, while Lion Travel Service Co (雄獅旅行社) closed up 9.82 percent, near the daily limit, at NT$179, exchange data showed.
Speaking on the sidelines of a legislative hearing in Taipei, Vice Premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) said it appeared that foreign institutional investors were ready to rebuild their holdings in the local stock market, which is another reason that the stabilization fund committee at a meeting on Thursday said that it would terminate its intervention.
While the fund would unload the shares it has acquired during its 275-day intervention, that would not affect stock prices, Cheng said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS