US labor dispute stalls ships
Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮) has been unable to unload 11 ships carrying tons of cargo amid a labor dispute involving longshoremen at several ports along the US's East Coast.
The ships, carrying merchandise to be delivered to retailers, including Costco Wholesale Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc, remain at docks at the Port of New York and New Jersey. Others were diverted to Canada or Panama.
International Longshoremen's Association members have refused to handle Evergreen cargo since May 14 after the company refused to recognize a 3-2 vote in December to join the ILA by five office workers.
Chips off the old block imported
Taiwan plans to import 8.1 million tonnes of gravel from China over one year as part of efforts to ease the country's shortage of construction material, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
The ministry agreed on Thursday after finishing marathon negotiations with construction- sector representatives to set the annual gravel import volume from China at 8.1 million tons for the year beginning this month.
Since January, domestic gravel importers have filed applications with the ministry's Board of Foreign Trade for imports of Chinese gravel amounting to 63.5 million tonnes, according to board officials.
Taiwan began to import Chi-nese gravel in 2001, when the nation's imports for the year totalled 1.8 million tonnes. The figure surged to 9 million tons last year.
Quanta reports sales rise 79.8%
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), the nation's largest notebook computer maker, said last month's sales rose 79.8 percent from a year earlier.
Sales rose to NT$20.7 billion (US$596 million) from NT$11.5 billion. Sales increased from NT$20.6 billion in the previous month.
Compal predicts laptop growth
Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), the world's second-largest maker of notebook computers, expects new PC chips from Intel Corp to help lift global laptop sales by about 20 percent, a local newspaper said, citing the company's president.
Price cuts for Intel's Centrino chips that connect notebook computers to the Internet with a radio link should help stimulate demand, the report said, citing Compal president Ray Chen (陳瑞聰).
Growth in sales of notebook computers this year will exceed the 5 percent rate for desktop computers, the report quoted Chen as saying.
Compal, which also makes products such as cellphones, last year posted NT$117.2 billion (US$3.4 billion) in sales, up 51 percent from 2001.
No Iraqi oil order yet
Chinese Petroleum Corp (中油) said yesterday that it will not bid for the first post-president Sad-dam Hussein crude, but is interested in signing a long-term contract with Iraq.
"As a state-run company, we are conservative and want stable oil supply. Therefore, we sign long-term purchase contracts - sometimes longer than five years -- with foreign oil companies," a company official said, asking not to be named.
"After the war, Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization [SOMO] is just starting to operate. We will watch what negotiation terms SOMO gives to other importers and how much flexibility it has. If it can give us preferential terms, we do not rule out signing long-term contract with SOMO," she said by phone.
NT dollar holds steady
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded unchanged against its US counterpart at NT$34.665 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$346 million.
Agencies
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
CHINA RIVAL: The chips are positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell products and would enable clusters connecting more than 100,000 chips Moore Threads Technology Co (摩爾線程) introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial intelligence (AI) developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) in years. “These products will significantly enhance world-class computing speed and capabilities that all developers aspire to,” Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong (張建中), a former Nvidia executive, said on Saturday at a company event in Beijing. “We hope they can meet the needs of more developers in China so that you no longer need to wait for advanced foreign products.” Chinese chipmakers are in
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