A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd-led group of eight companies won a ?105 billion (US$896 million) order to build about half of Taiwan's planned high-speed rail line, which is modeled on Japan's bullet trains.
The entire 345km link between the capital Taipei and the southern city of Kaohsiung will cost NT$446.4 billion (US$13.4 billion) and should be completed by October 2005.
"We expect a decision regarding the rest of the track by the end of the year," said Susumu Uchida, Mitsubishi Heavy's deputy director of transport technologies. "We're confident that we will win it."
Recent cutbacks in government spending have prompted Japanese rail companies to look to the expanding economies of other Asian countries for business opportunities. Mitsubishi Heavy is in talks to build similar high-speed links in China as well as Thailand and India, Uchida said.
"It's a mature market in Japan. Japanese companies have got to go overseas for growth," said Graeme McDonald, an analyst at HSBC Securities Japan Ltd. The European railway systems market is dominated by local companies such as Germany's Siemens AG and Alstom of France, so Asian markets offer the best growth prospects, he said.
The other companies in the consortium are Mitsui & Co., Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd, Toshiba Corp, Mitsubishi Corp, Marubeni Corp, Sumitomo Corp and Taiwan's Evergreen Development Corp (長榮開發).
HSBC's McDonald has an "add" rating on Mitsubishi Heavy shares and a "reduce" recommendation on Kawasaki Heavy stock.
The companies signed the contracts with Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (
The company didn't include the order for the track in its May order backlog forecast, Uchida said. In May he said the total value of orders will rise 13 percent to ?2.7 trillion in the year to March 31.
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