The government is considering prohibiting the sales of Tsingtao beer from China, two days after it stopped the local agent of the Chinese brewery from running ads on local radio and television stations, officials said yesterday.
"I have asked the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp [TTL, 台灣菸酒公司] and relevant departments to study whether to allow the sales of Tsingtao beer in Taiwan," Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (林全) said.
His comment came after demand by DPP lawmakers that the ministry ban sales of the beer in retaliation of Beijing's barring Taiwan from marketing its popular Taiwan Beer in China under its original brand name.
"Our application for the marketing of Taiwan Beer has twice been rejected by Chinese authorities," DPP Legislator Lin Chung-mao (
The board has only been allowed to market its popular beer under the name TTL since it started selling the beer in China last year.
Lin Chung-mao said China has also banned the sales of Kinmen Kaoliang liquor and these actions show that Chinese authorities will not allow the sales of Taiwanese products with Taiwan in their name.
"It is highly unfair for us to agree to the import of mainland beers with Chinese areas' titles, such as Tsingtao Beer and Yenjing Beer," the lawmaker said.
The lawmaker asked that the TTL resolves the issue by next month or he would initiate a motion to sack the company's chairman Morgan Huang (
Minister Lin said it is China's law that no territorial titles can be used to name products imported to China and there is little the ministry can do to make Beijing change its law.
He said under the circumstances, he would ask government officials to study the possibility of barring Tsingtao Beer from being marketed domestically.
The Government Information Office has recently banned Tsingtao Brewery from making TV and radio commercials on the ground that the Legislative Yuan has yet to pass the revision of 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 requires prior regulatory approval for any ads broadcasting Chinese products.
The brewery's local agent, Taiwan Tsing Beer Corp (台灣青啤), cried foul, saying the ad ban was related to Beijing's rejection of the marketing of Taiwan Beer. Taiwan Tsing Beer is a unit of Taiwan-based Sanyo Whisbih Group (三洋維士比).
Since it entered the Taiwanese market last year, Tsingtao Beer has gained about 10 percent of the beer market, earning NT$2 billion (US$57.14 million).
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
RSS