Market watchers yesterday said a prediction by Taiwan's top trade official that July exports may plummet as a result of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was off the mark.
Board of Foreign Trade (BOFT) Director-General Huang Chih-peng (
"It's a bold estimation," Mike Lin (
Lin said although the outbreak of SARS had forced a fair amount of business activity to be cancelled or delayed, the impact on the IT industry is limited to the promotion of new products. Orders of popular products and components should remain steady, he said.
According to the Ministry of Finance, IT exports in March accounted for 10 percent of total exports. For the first three months of this year, export orders rose 10.17 percent to US$37.67 billion from a year earlier, the ministry reported late last month.
Wu Chung-shu (
"The production of export goods won't be hurt that much as long demand is stable," Wu said.
Another economist, Chang Yaw-tzong (張耀宗) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Department of Statistics, said that exports may dip, but foreign orders for postwar construction in Iraq may offset that drop somewhat. In addition, Taiwan has already seen some orders from SARS-hit regions such as China and Vietnam transfer to Taiwanese manufacturers, Chang said.
Huang's pessimistic forecast, however, was supported by another industry watcher yesterday.
Tsai Horng-ming (
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