Hotai to launch new compact
Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), the local sales agent for Toyota Motor Corp, said it plans to launch a new compact car on March 8, targeting younger buyers with preliminary sales up to 2,500 vehicles per month.
The new 1.5-liter, four-door Toyota Vios is slated to replace Tercel compacts launched domestically seven years ago, company president Chen Shuen-der (陳順德) said yesterday at a press meeting.
Hotai wants to use this model to continue dominating the small car segment as demand stagnates and customers choose cheaper compact cars.
The base price of the new car was not disclosed but is expected to reach between NT$400,000 and NT$500,000, according to Chen.
Hotai sold 100,531 Toyota vehicles last year nationwide, increasing 30.7 percent year-on-year to account for 25.2 percent of domestic market, said Wang Tung-chou (王通州), general manager for vehicles operations.
"We aim to remain leading the market by selling 95,000 vehicles this year, or accounting for 25 percent of the market," Wang said.
To compete with Hotai's new model, Ford Lio Ho Motor Co (福特六和) said it will introduce the re-modeled 1.6-liter Activa sedan on March 3.
"Hotai is a respectable rival," said Jeffrey Shen (沈英銓), president of Ford Lio Ho.
"We don't want to underestimate the impact [of Vios]," he said.
Red tape delays digital TV
The launch of Eastern Multi-media Group's (東森媒體科技集團) new digital TV service, including six foreign-language channels, has been delayed by Taipei City Government bureaucracy, a company official said yesterday.
The pricing for the set-top box needed to decode the digital TV signal has yet to be fixed by the city's Cable Rates Fee Review Committee, Fred Steiner, a senior manager at Eastern Broadcasting Co (東森華榮) said.
Once the charge -- expected to be set at around NT$5,000 -- has been set, consumers can order the box from their local cable provider if the provider is a member of the Eastern Multimedia Group.
The new digital service, announced last month, will include six foreign-language channels -- BBC World, Australia's ABC Asia-Pacific, France's TV5, Germany's Deutsche Welle, Singapore's Channel News Asia and South Korea's Arirang TV.
Ultimately Eastern Multimedia plans to offer 600 foreign and Chinese channels via the digital service.
The payment for the set-top box is a one-time charge, but the subscribers can opt to buy the box via a rent-to-own scheme, paying around NT$200 for two years and seven months.
Advanced posts Q4 loss
Advanced Semiconductor Engin-eering Inc (日月光), the world's second-largest chip packager, said its fourth-quarter loss narrowed from a year earlier after it signed up new customers.
Net loss shrank to NT$29 million (US$834,350) from NT$1.2 billion a year ago, the company said in a statement. Sales, based on monthly company reports, rose 22 percent to NT$7.2 billion, beating the company's NT$6.4 billion forecast.
Demand for the company's most-advanced packaging technology increased in the fourth quarter, spokesman Freddie Liu (劉英武) said.
NT dollar strengthens
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded higher against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.044 to close at NT$34.788 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$425 million, compared with the previous day's US$260 million.
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