Market Trend

Due to the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays, the MCI bi-weekly report originally slated for release on Jan 26, 2009 was delayed to this week. Thus, the 20090202 MCI report covers the index changes during the past three weeks instead of the usual two. Future MCI reports will continue to be made on a bi-weekly basis.

Between January 12, 2009 to January 30, 2009, the MCI index rose from 4363.2 to 4386.4, up slightly by 23.2 points. The index variations during this time period were relatively small, fluctuating between 4255 and 4482. A key reason stemmed from the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays, where the stock prices of the Taiwan and Korean panel makers were respectively unavailable for 7 and 2 days. In addition, the index also appeared to be weighed by the panel makers’ expected quarterly financial losses for 4Q08. For reference, among the already released figures, LGD and Samsung respectively posted a 7% and 8% operating loss, while AUO reported a whopping 44.3% operating loss. On a different note, it is worthy to note that the MCI index started to fall below the 20-day average on Jan 21, 2009. The difference with the 20-day average reached as high as 126.3 points during the index’s subsequent development. Fortunately, as of Jan 30, it narrowed to 11.0 points. The crossover reflects the still shaky outlook surrounding the TFT-LCD industry, despite market anticipations of a monitor panel price increase in February.