Taiwan's renowned software park was hit hard by last week's Typhoon Nari, which cut off power and communications to the high-tech facility for eight days.
That shutdown idled offices and halted operations for the 88 high-tech firms that call the Nankang Software Park (
Located in the east Taipei suburb of Nankang, the park was without water or electricity from Sept. 17 until Tuesday.
PHOTO: LIAO RAY-SHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Air conditioning is not expected to be fully restored until Monday.
The park is expected to report typhoon-related losses of less than NT$200 million, a park administration official said yesterday.
"Though it's too early to tell exactly how much the losses are, the figure is definitely not going to exceed NT$200 million, based on our preliminary assessments," Jack Yu (游文杰), general manager of the Nankang Software Park Service and Management Co (捷正管理公司), told the Taipei Times yesterday.
"The electronic and mechanical equipment are in underground levels of the park, which was completely inundated by the massive flood waters brought about by Typhoon Nari last week," Yu said.
Many park firms have also complained about being isolated from the outside world due to communications disruptions, Yu said. "With the assistance of Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), we expect all T1 lines to resume operations [this morning] while ADSL lines will return to normal service on Sept. 28."
However, with one of Chung-hwa's transmission stations in Nankang still down -- and not expected to be operational until Sept. 30 -- there will be some communication bottlenecks and congestion, Yu indicated.
"Some companies have told me that connection time to reach people outside the park doubled or tripled," Yu said. The software park is expected to have normal communications by tomorrow evening.
This is the second time the Nankang Software Park has suffered floods and power outages due to a typhoon. "The park was last hit by a typhoon in November of last year but the damage at that time was much less significant than this time," Yu recalled.
While the park administration has been discussing how to improve the park's infrastructure development with government agencies, Yu said his top concern is company confidence in the industrial park.
"If the government does not work hard enough in terms of flood-prevention measures, some may consider moving out of the park," Yu warned.
Jointly created by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the non-profit Institute for Information Industry and the local software industry, the park was funded with an initial investment of NT$900 million (US$29 million) in 1999.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by