Tax revenue last year increased 7.9 percent from a year earlier to NT$3.73 trillion (US$112.62 billion), exceeding the government’s budget target by NT$497.2 billion, aided by hefty gains in securities transaction, personal income and business tax revenues, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
The real surplus could reach NT$510 billion if late payments are added in, ministry statistician Liu Shun-rong (劉訓蓉) told an online media briefing, adding that it is the fourth consecutive year that revenues exceeded the official target.
Revenue from securities transaction taxes amounted to NT$288 billion, spiking 46 percent from one year earlier, as average daily turnover swelled 42.6 percent to NT$477.4 billion, Liu said.
Photo: Clare Cheng, Taipei Times
“The sharp rise came from fund flows to the local bourse to take advantage of the artificial intelligence-stock fever,” Liu said.
The TAIEX rallied 28.47 percent last year, second only to the US’ tech-heavy NASDAQ’s 29.81 percent gain, she said.
Corporate income tax revenue grew 3.6 percent to NT$1.12 trillion even though non-tech firms took a hard hit from a lingering global economic slowdown and overproduction from Chinese peers, Liu said, attributing the small increase to a relatively low base in 2023 due to profit declines and temporary tax relief measures.
Revenue from personal income tax expanded 8.9 percent to NT$822.2 billion, aided by higher cash dividends and capital gains from property transfers, she said.
The first half of last year saw a bullish housing market, propelled by favorable lending terms for first-home purchases. The trend boosted housing loans near a record-high in August, prompting the central bank to expand credit controls in September to pre-empt what it called a repeat of the housing bubble bust seen in the US in 2008.
Revenue from land value increase tax upon resale of real-
estate properties gained 5.3 percent to NT$99 billion, the ministry reported.
Business tax revenue expanded 6.4 percent to NT$608.9 billion, as domestic banks benefitted from interest rate hikes, while local suppliers of electronic components reaped a windfall from active investment in artificial intelligence by US cloud service providers, it said.
Additionally, revenue from entertainment tax grew more than two-fold, as Taiwanese packed major music concerts and sports events, Liu said.
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