Japanese high-tech giant NEC said yesterday it will resume boosting capacity at a semiconductor joint venture in China after freezing investments in 2001 because of a market slump.
Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics Co, which is 28.6 percent owned by NEC Corp, will spend about Japanese Yen 10 billion (US$85 million) on expanding its production capacity by 60 percent by the end of this year, an NEC spokesman said.
The venture, which supplies products to NEC companies, would also expand its customer base to local home appliance and mobile phone manufacturers, said the spokesman.
Monthly production of eight-inch wafers would be lifted to 32,000 from 20,000. The firm, majority-owned by Shanghai Hua Hong, will become one of the largest producers of wafers in China.
"We expect demand in the Chinese market to grow considerably," said the spokesman, adding that the joint venture was also targeting customers in the US.
Separately, NEC said it would appoint senior executive Akinobu Kanasugi as president to replace Koji Nishigaki, who is retiring.
No reason was given for the decision but a news conference was scheduled for later in the day.
Nishigaki was hospitalized in October, the Nihon Keizai reported, adding that the issue had not yet been decided.
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
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],”
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day