The number of initial public offerings (IPO) would pick up this year, driven by high tech and biotechnology firms seeking to grow and upgrade by taking advantage of the local capital market, Deloitte & Touche Taiwan said yesterday.
Deloitte Taiwan’s guarded optimistic outlook came after IPOs last year totaled 45 and together raised a 10-year high of NT$37.9 billion (US$1.213 billion), at odds with a global slowdown amid lingering economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions.
“The local IPO market has a good chance of flourishing this year, helped by an economic recovery as well as regulatory easing and promotion of the Taiwan Innovation Board, a new platform clustering innovative listings,” Deloitte Taiwan CEO Jason Ke (柯志賢) told a media briefing.
Photo: Bloomberg
Many stock exchanges around the world have lowered listing thresholds to create funding access for innovative companies and Taiwan’s policymakers have rolled out an action plan to achieve similar ends, Ke said.
The number of IPOs could climb to 63 this year, including 24 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, 24 on the Taipei Exchange and 15 on the Taiwan Innovation Board, the consultancy’s audit and assurance business leader Titan Lee (李東峰) said.
Taiwan is home to the world’s largest suppliers of electronics used in smartphones, high-performance computing, data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
The local bourse is attractive in light of regulatory transparency and accountability, procedural ease and competitive underwriting charges, Lee said.
Price-to-earnings ratios in local shares moved up noticeably in the past few years, thanks to the rising importance of Taiwan’s chipmakers on the world stage, government officials said.
The TAIEX last year finished up 26.8 percent with capitalization on the local bourse hitting NT$56.8 trillion and it is expected to reach NT$60 trillion on the back of capital inflows despite weak exports.
Airoha Technology (達發科技), a fabless IC design company and subsidiary of MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest 5G smartphone chip designer, raised NT$8.9 billion upon its debut, accounting for a 24 percent share, Deloitte Taiwan said.
Tech firms might continue to dominate the IPO market this year as Taiwanese players command the world’s technology leadership positions and would actively seize business opportunities related to generative AI, Deloitte Taiwan said.
Biotechnology firms would also lend growth momentum in the IPO market, the consultancy said.
Bora Pharmaceuticals (保瑞) and Taidoc Technology Corp (泰博) last year successfully shifted their listing from the Taipei Exchange to the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Deloitte Taiwan said, predicting that peers would launch similar attempts.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS