JAPAN
Stimulus plans unchanged
Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Kazuo Ueda said he saw little need to alter monetary stimulus plans ahead of his first policy meeting as the bank’s chief, forecasting underlying inflation to weaken. “Our stance is to continue with monetary stimulus along with our price outlook,” Ueda said yesterday in response to questions in parliament. “Inflation is expected to cool to below 2 percent in the second half of this fiscal year” ending in March next year, he added. While some expect that some adjustments to the BOJ’s yield curve control policy, Ueda said the bank was not at a stage to discuss tweaking it. Data on Friday showed Japan’s consumer prices excluding fresh food and energy gained the most since 1981.
SEMICONDUCTORS
US pressures Seoul on China
The US has asked South Korea to urge its chipmakers not to fill any market gap in China if Beijing bans Micron Technology Inc from selling semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. Washington asked Seoul to encourage Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc to hold back from boosting sales to China if Micron is banned as a result of an investigation by Beijing, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the situation. The Chinese Cyberspace Administration last month said it would conduct a security review of Micron products sold in the country. The chipmaker said last month it was cooperating with the Chinese government, and its operations in the country were normal. The White House did not comment on the report, only saying that Washington and Seoul have made efforts to coordinate investments in the semiconductor sector, secure critical technologies and address economic coercion.
UNITED KINGDOM
Home sellers wary on pricing
British property owners are turning more cautious about asking for higher prices, according to a survey from online property analyst Rightmove. Average asking prices rose 1.7 percent from a year earlier to ￡366,247 (US$455,950), the slowest pace since December 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic and government tax breaks triggered a frenzy of buying. The monthly pace of increase slowed to 0.2 percent from 0.8 percent last month. The figures point to a stagnating market in which a shortage of new properties for sale is keeping prices aloft despite a jump in mortgage rates and double-digit inflation. While asking price growth slowed, first-time buyers faced record prices, and there were signs of improving confidence among buyers and sellers, Rightmove analyst Tim Bannister said in a statement yesterday.
ADANI GROUP
Bonds rise amid buyback
Adani Group bonds rose after a key company started the first debt buyback by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s conglomerate since it was targeted by a short seller in January. Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone Ltd plans to buy back as much as US$130 million of its July 2024 bonds and similar amounts in each of the next four quarters, as it tries to show that its liquidity position is comfortable, the firm said in a stock exchange filing. The buyback marks another effort by the group to regain investor confidence, including trimming capital spending, after a Hindenburg Research report pounded its bonds and shares. Adani Ports’ “measured pace” of repaying debt should enable it to maintain its revised capital spending target of about US$550 million in the fiscal year started this month, Bloomberg Intelligence reported.
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