UMC Accelerates Bottoming Out! Two Major Backers Go Wild, 960,000 Shareholders Face 100-Dollar Defense Battle

Taiwan's stock market faced a severe sell-off on Wednesday, with the Taiex index plummeting 1564 points and briefly touching 39384 points. While major tech stocks like TSMC, Powerchip Semiconductor, and Innolux saw their losses narrow, allowing the index to narrowly hold the 40,000-point level by the close, the market sentiment remained fragile.

Institutional investors, a key support for the market, continued their buying spree, with investment trusts purchasing NT$9.094 billion worth of stocks. However, this support did not extend to United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). Investment trusts aggressively sold off over 10,000 UMC shares, and proprietary traders also offloaded 2,906 shares, making them the top two net sellers.

This concerted selling by domestic investors led to UMC's stock price hitting the daily limit down for two consecutive days. It closed at NT$102.5, raising concerns that the crucial 100 New Taiwan dollar support level might not hold. UMC, with over 960,000 shareholders, is facing a critical battle to defend its share price.

The broader market also saw significant drops, with the KOSPI in South Korea falling about 6% and the Nikkei in Japan experiencing a drop of over 1900 points at one point. In Taiwan, the market's intraday decline reached 2219 points, highlighting a widespread downturn across Asian markets.