China Motor launches minivans
China Motor Corp (中華汽車) yesterday launched the new Savrin minivans with an aim to sell 80,000 new vehicles this year in Taiwan, a top executive said yesterday.
China Motor, the local auto assembler and distributor for Mitsubishi Motors Corp, sold 100,013 vehicles last year.
"We hope to sell around 20,000 Savrins this year," Su Ching-yang (蘇慶陽), president of China Motor, said yesterday. The revamped 2.0-liter vehicles, equipped with the latest bluetooth wireless technology, will retail for between NT$899,000 and NT$929,000.
Vice president and spokesman Hsu Li-min (許利民) said the war in Iraq has so far created no problem for the company's auto production at home. But he said the war, if prolonged longer than expected, may hurt its exports this year. China Motor said early this year that it aims to export 11,800 cars this year, compared with 7,695 cars last year.
Last week China Motor started making Lancer sedans in China at Southeast Motor Co (東南汽車), a venture with the Fujian provincial government. The venture hopes to sell 100,000 vehicles this year, Hsu said.
Chine steel sees supply shortfall
China Steel Corp (中鋼) said Wednesday it expects a global supply shortfall in the next year with prices unlikely to decline during the period.
"The current situation suggests demand will be higher than supply worldwide in the next year," company chairman Lin Wen-yuan (林文淵) said.
"I do not know whether prices will go up or not but I do not expect any softening over the next 12 months," he said. "My priority is to supply to domestic manufacturers, then to those that export after assembly and finally to other countries."
China Steel will increase supply to domestic clients by 13 percent in the second quarter, he said.
Military, schools get excess rice
After meeting the nation's WTO quota obligations, Taiwan is currently in excess of 700,000 tonnes of imported rice, which will go to military and school tables, an official at the Council of Agriculture said yesterday.
"After a taste test last month, we found that the military is very satisfied with imported rice from the US," council vice chairman Lee Jen-chyuan (李健全) said at a press conference.
According to Lee, Taiwan is obliged to import annually 140,000 tonnes of top-tier rice from the US and Australia. After auctioning part of the imported rice to the private sector, the council still found an oversupply of imported rice in the government's coffer and, therefore, asked the military and schools to help consume the excessive rice.
Lee said that it'll be up to both sectors to decide whether they would stick to locally-produced rice or use imported rice on their meal tables from April on.
MOI announces amendments
The Ministry of the Interior announced law amendments yesterday that allow qualified potential customers from China to enter the country to study real estate at the invitation of Taiwanese sellers.
The amendments are in conjunction with a revision made Aug. 8 last year to the Statute Governing the Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), which allows people from China to purchase real estate in in an effort to give a boost to the domestic sector.
NT dollar drops
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.041 to close at NT$34.794 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$311 million.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained