Semiconductor History | 仰德大樓, 22 October 1993 — YAGEO Joins Taiwan’s Automated Market

On 22 October 1993, shares in YAGEO (國巨) began trading on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under code 2327. A maker of components designed to disappear inside other products had become visible to the public market.

Those shares entered an exchange that had just remade itself. On 2 August 1993, less than twelve weeks before YAGEO’s listing, every listed stock was brought into Taiwan’s fully automated trading system.

The centralized market’s physical address was here, on the thirteenth floor of 仰德大樓 at 1 and 3 Nanhai Road. The exchange had opened this column-free trading hall of more than 400 ping on 3 July 1984, then gradually replaced human order handling with computer-assisted and finally fully automated matching.

That timing makes YAGEO’s first trading day more than a financing milestone. It joined Taiwan’s capital market at the moment when the market itself became an electronic machine.

The corporate name carried its own hidden circuitry. YAGEO’s company history records that Taiwan Resistors (台灣阻抗), established in 1987, merged with the original YAGEO in November 1989; Taiwan Resistors survived legally and adopted the YAGEO name.

The products were modest but indispensable: resistors control current and divide voltage, while capacitors store and release charge. A computer could match shares without paper or shouted orders, but the computer still depended on vast numbers of passive components to behave predictably.

The listing preceded YAGEO’s expansion into a global component group. Its later history included the acquisition of Philips’ ceramic-components and magnetic-materials operations in 2000 and the completion of the KEMET acquisition in 2020.

仰德大樓 still stands, although its signs now identify government offices rather than a stock-exchange floor. Part of the old thirteenth-floor market is now FinTechSpace, a financial-technology hub—an unusually literal afterlife for the room where Taiwan’s automated market took shape.

The cover photograph shows the Roosevelt Road-facing wing of 仰德大樓 today; the former centralized market occupied the connected complex’s thirteenth floor.

Photo: Yu tptw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons