Joint venture wins rail project
A joint venture between Australian construction company Barclay Mowlem Rail Group and Teco Electric and Machinery Co (東元電機) secured a NT$3.3 billion contract to build the Tsoying Depot in southern Taiwan for the Taiwan High Speed Rail project, statements from both companies said yesterday.
The Tsoying Depot is expected to carry out routine inspections and service rolling stock for the new high-speed railway link between Taipei and Kaohsiung, which is scheduled to open in 2005.
The joint venture will construct 31 structures on the 40-hectare Tsoying site, including ballasted track rail sidings, rail storage areas and signaling facilities, and large steel-framed portal constructions and workshops.
China Airlines adding flights
China Airlines Co (華航) plans to add flights to Honolulu and Frankfurt to meet an increase in demand as the SARS epidemic subsides.
The carrier will add two flights a week to Honolulu from Taipei starting next Thursday, boosting the number to seven a week, public relations specialist Joseph Wu (武志厚) said. The airlines will also add a fourth weekly flight to Frankfurt starting two days later, he said.
China Airlines' sales fell 13 percent to NT$5.35 billion (US$156 million) last month from a year ago.
Taiwan may pay less for LNG
The state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp (中油) may pay less than US$3 per million British thermal units for liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar, below the average price for the fuel in East Asia, Tex Report's Daily Energy edition said, without saying where it obtained the information.
The price to be paid by Chinese Petroleum for LNG from Qatar's Ras Laffan venture was based on an assumed oil price of US$20 per barrel, Tex said. LNG prices are typically set by a formula that's linked to benchmark oil prices.
Japanese buyers now pay an average US$3.80 per million British thermal units for LNG, based on the same assumed oil price, Tex said.
Chinese Petroleum last week won a NT$298.2 billion (US$8.7 billion) contract to supply the LNG bought from Qatar to Taiwan Power Co (台電) for 25 years starting in 2008.
DoCoMo urges share swap
NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's top mobile operator, wants its Taiwanese unit, KG Telecommunications Co (和信電訊), to swap shares with bigger rival Far EasTone Telecom-munications Co (遠傳電信) instead of cash for a merger to avoid losses, a Chinese-language newspaper reported, without citing its sources.
The paper said Far EasTone chairman Douglas Hsu (徐旭東) has a tentative agreement with NTT DoCoMo to swap shares, adding that Far EasTone's offer of NT$12 a share for KG Telecom would lead to losses on NTT DoCoMo's investment in KG Telecom.
Yang to quit bank job
Yang Tze-kaing (楊子江), who has been appointed vice minister of Finance, will quit his presidency at the China Development Industrial Bank (CDIB, 中華開發工銀) to take up his new job next Wednesday, the lender's parent company China Development Financial Holding Co (中華開發金控) said yesterday in a statement.
To replace Yang, the board of China Development Financial yesterday appointed Benny Hu (胡定吾), CDIB's chairman, to double as the bank's president.
NT dollar continues gains
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday continued its strength against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.009 to close at NT$34.341 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$1.054 billion.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS