Record US$14.5bn in exports
Export orders rose 14.83 percent to an all-time monthly high of US$14.5 billion last month following a gradual global economic recovery, the Ministry of Economic Affairs reported yesterday.
Export orders are indicative of actual shipments in one to three months. Orders in the first seven months of the year totalled to US$93.21 billion, up 9.33 percent from the previous year, the ministry said.
Orders from Hong Kong rose 29 percent to US$3.4 billion last month, according to the ministry. Orders from the US, Taiwan's second-biggest export market, rose 8.8 percent to US$4 billion, while orders from Europe increased 15 percent to US$2 billion and those from Japan rose by a quarter to US$1.7 billion.
Electronic-goods orders rose 17 percent to US$2.8 billion and those for telecommunications equipment increased 29 percent to US$2.9 billion.
Industrial production rose 7.5 percent last month, after increasing a revised 2.3 percent in June, the ministry said.
Lin Chuan off to US
Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (林全) is scheduled to leave for the US today with a 46-member delegation to promote investment in Taiwan.
He will visit New York and Boston to host a "2003 Taiwan Investment Forum" and delivering speeches in both cities, Lin told a press conference yesterday.
Lin said he will highlight the nation's recent relaxation of foreign investment restrictions.
Lin said the government wants to make Taiwan a capital-raising hub in the Asia-Pacific region.
Lin also announced the appointment of Shea Jia-dong (許嘉 棟), former chairman of China External Trade Development Council, as the director general of Central Trust of China (中央信託局), replacing retiring Huang Rong-shean (黃榮顯).
Shea is scheduled to take office in the middle of next month.
Hon Hai to buy Eimo
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), the nation's largest electronics manufacturer, will buy Finnish cellphone-cover maker Eimo Oyj for 67 million euros (US$74 million) to boost its presence in the mobile-phone industry.
Hon Hai, through its Foxconn Finland Invest Oy, will offer 1.04 euros for each Eimo share. The Paananen family, Eimo's main owner, will get 0.96 euro per share, Eimo said in a statement to the Helsinki exchange. The offer period is scheduled to start Sept. 4.
The Paananens said earlier they were in talks to sell the unprofitable company, which plans to shed assets and cut more jobs this year.
Mosel subject of trading probe
Mosel Vitelic Inc (茂矽), a partner in the country's second-largest memory-chip maker ProMOS Technol-ogies Inc (茂德科技), is under investigation by stock-market regulators on suspicion of insider trading, the local edition of Apple Daily reported, citing unidentified government officials.
Mosel sold 11.8 million shares in ProMOS in April without notifying stock-market regulators, triggering an investigation by the Securities and Futures Commission, the report said. The company could be fined as much as NT$600,000 (US$17,500) if found in violation.
Mosel on June 26 said it failed to pay part of a NT$1.6 billion bond, its second debt default in two months. The company in May deferred settlement of a NT$4.7 billion bond after missing payment in April.
NT dollar gains ground
The New Taiwan dollar continued to gain ground against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.060 to close at NT$34.238 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$731 million.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts