Twinhead International Corp (倫飛電腦), which makes notebook computers for Sharp Corp, said it will fire a fifth of its workforce to cut costs and boost competitiveness.
Twinhead will fire 200 workers at its factory in southern Taiwan, less than five months after it sacked 117 employees at the same plant, the company said in a statement.
With the latest dismissals, Twinhead has cut staff by more than a quarter so far this year.
Computer-related companies in Taiwan are slashing profit targets and reducing costs by shedding workers as demand for PCs and the components used to make them fails to recover.
Taiwan's economy is already struggling with record unemployment and the slowest first-quarter growth in more than two decades.
Twinhead's layoffs will further damp any prospect of a recovery in consumers' appetite to spend. Taiwan's consumer prices fell in June for a third month.
On Tuesday, LG Philips Displays, a venture with South Korea's LG Group and Royal Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands, said it would close two factories and fire 1,200 workers in Taiwan as falling demand for computers crimped sales of PC monitors.
Last week, Twinhead lowered its 2001 sales forecast by 67 percent to NT$6 billion (US$174 million) and said it expected to post a pretax NT$685 million loss this year. The company posted losses for the previous two years.
Twinhead shares rose NT$0.35, or 6.9 percent, to NT$5.45.
The shares have risen 32 percent this year, compared with a 0.7 percent fall in the TAIEX.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the