Government officials hope to build a biotechnology industry with a production value of NT$150 billion (US$4.5 billion) by 2006 -- triple the current value.
Biotechnology is seen as an important part of an overall plan to develop industries meant to replace the information technology manufacturing companies migrating to China. Investment across the Taiwan Strait has risen as the economic downturn has forced companies to pare costs and boost profits.
The local biotech sector will have to grow by NT$50 billion every two years to meet the government's goal. The sector earned NT$49.5 billion for Taiwan last year, with products ranging from bio-chips and protein drugs to medical equipment, according to Alex Fang (
About NT$22.5 billion accounted for "pure" biotech products last year, while medical-equipment sales made up the remaining NT$27 billion.
Pharmaceutical products, which are treated as a separate category, reached NT$51.4 billion in sales last year, ministry statistics show.
The government has set aside NT$52 billion to develop the industry. NT$12 billion was spent last year to upgrade facilities at Academia Sinica and develop university programs, build research centers and attract talent. Over the next four years, the remaining NT$40 billion will be dispersed at a rate of NT$10 billion per year.
The Executive Yuan's Development Fund (開發基金) has also been tapped to help build a homegrown biotech industry by adding some NT$30 billion to the pockets of local venture capital firms, with incentives if they invest in local biotech start-ups.
The fund would be combined with NT$70 billion, which must be 30 percent government capital and 70 percent private, a Cabinet official said.
Any fund investing 20 percent of its total cash in a Taiwanese biotechnology company would be allowed to invest the remaining capital overseas, while funds investing in other sectors would be required to invest 50 percent locally and the remainder could be used abroad.
The Development Fund is charged with providing seed money for new industries, such as TFT-LCD panel production and semiconductor design. There are already 36 investments in the Development Fund portfolio.
In rival Singapore, the Business Times newspaper reported that the city-state has channeled more than US$700 million into biotech funds since 2000, including US$568 million for biomedical sciences and US$120 million for other initiatives.
Singapore's Agency of Science, Technology and Research has also allocated US$857 million for biotechnology R&D and another US$1.13 billion for biotech start-ups and overseas investments in the sector.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts