■ Tourism
CKS passengers climb
The number of inbound and outbound passengers at CKS International Airport broke the 20,000-mark Friday for the first time since April when SARS was prevalent in Taiwan. According to official tallies, CKS airport -- Taiwan's main gateway -- served a total of 22,331 passengers Friday, with 9,323 arrivals and 13,008 departures. The average occupancy rate of airplanes leaving or arriving CKS Airport also reached 124.06 persons, up 17.54 persons from a day earlier. The number of passengers going through the airport began to decline after SARS gripped the island in mid-March and the downward trend was aggravated late that month when a temperature-taking requirement was first imposed on all incoming passengers. The decline became even steeper after arriving passengers from SARS-affected areas were required to undergo 10-day home quarantine in mid-April.
■ Aviation
Rolls Royce to cut jobs
Jet engine maker Rolls-Royce Corp plans to cut 520 jobs this year through voluntary resignations or layoffs, the company said. With comm-ercial engine orders down 18 percent since 2001, the company will trim 11.8 percent of its 4,400 hourly and salaried positions, officials said Thursday. Most of the cuts are expected in July and August. Commercial airlines have cut orders, hammering the company in Indianapolis. Orders from the military have remained steady, accounting for about 40 percent of the plant's US$1.3 billion in annual sales. "After [the attacks of] Sept. 11 we waited for the rebound to happen in the airline industry, and it just never did," said spokesman John Brown. The company delivered 685 commercial engines in 2001 but has orders in hand for only 561 this year, Brown said. Similar volumes are projected over the next two years.
■ Policy
S Korea cuts Russian debt
South Korea agreed Friday to cut Russia's US$2.2 billion Soviet-era debt by US$500 million and agreed to new terms on the remaining amount, a Russian deputy finance minister said. The first US$300 million of the remaining US$1.6 billion in debt is to be returned by 2006 in the form of military goods and the rest must be repaid by 2025, either in installments of cash or other goods, the Interfax news agency quoted Sergei Kolotukhin as saying. Kolotukhin said the terms agreed to by South Korea are better for Russia than those offered by the Paris and London clubs, groups of creditor nations that seek ways for debtor nations to make good on their payments.
■ Aviation
Boeing cuts 860 workers
About 860 workers spent their last day on the Boeing payroll, and the company handed out 60-day layoff notices to another 845 employees. The scheduled job cuts came as Washington and other states submitted bids for the proposed Boeing 7E7 jetliner assembly plant, which would employ an estimated 1,200 workers. Those leaving the payroll were notified of the layoffs April 18. They include about 630 employees from the Puget Sound area. Most of the new layoff notices were being issued to workers in Boeing's Commercial Airplanes division, Boeing spokesman Bill Cogswell said. The rest were employees in the company's support division, Shared Services, and other Boeing businesses, he said. So far, Boeing has cut 33,890 jobs under a payroll reduction plan that started in December 2001. The latest round will bring the company close to its initial target of cutting 35,000 jobs.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by