Foreign investment soars
Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Yi-fu (林義夫) announced yesterday that Taiwan has attracted 186 foreign investment projects valued at NT$138.38 billion so far this year, exceeding the government's targeted NT$100 billion.
Companies that consented to invest in Taiwan encompass a wide range of industries including display, semiconductor, biotechnology, precision, telecommunications and others, Lin said.
Lin's remarks relate to a four-day international conference, the 2003 Taiwan Business Alliance Conference, that will kick off Sunday to lure foreign investment.
One prominent investor is NTT DoCoMo Inc of Japan, who plans to improve cooperation with Taiwanese counterparts by having local companies to manufacture its "i-mode" handset, Lin said.
Lin also said 1,781 guests from Taiwan and other countries have already signed up for the upcoming conference.
Taiwan-Panama FTA lauded
Panamanian government leaders in charge of commercial and agricultural affairs were happy about the approval of the Taiwan-Panamanian free trade agreement on Monday by the Panamanian Legislative Assembly.
Speaker Jacobo Salas of the Legislative Assembly said Panamanian farmers, ranchers and animal-feed producers will benefit significantly from the agreement. The agreement will also help promote the economic development in the inner parts of the country, he added.
Minister of Commerce and Industry Joaquin Jacome said the agreement can serve as a springboard for traders of the two countries to develop their foreign markets. The agreement will help Taiwan traders sell their products to Latin America through Panama, and help Panamanian exporters send their products to Asia through Taiwan, he explained.
The agreement, jointly signed by President Chen Shui-bian and his Panamanian counterpart Mireya Moscoso in Taipei on Aug. 21, is expected to come into force on Jan. 1 next year.
SanDisk Corp to appeal case
SanDisk Corp, the world's biggest maker of flash-memory cards used in digital cameras and portable music players, lost a patent-infringement case against Ritek Corp (錸德).
Ritek was accused of producing flash-memory cards that used SanDisk's technology illegally, SanDisk said in a statement. Flash memory stores data whether a device is switched on or off.
A US district court in California misinterpreted the patent's claims, and the ruling will be appealed immediately, Sunnyvale, California-based SanDisk said.
Acer Inc buys own shares
Acer Inc will spend as much as NT$14.8 billion (US$439 million) repurchasing its shares, part of a strategy to boost their price.
Acer will buy, starting from yesterday, for two months as many as 40 million shares for as much as NT$52 each, it said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp. Acer will offer a premium of more than 8 percent for the shares, based on their closing price on Monday.
Acer will probably write off the shares after buying them, reducing its stock outstanding by as much as 1.9 percent and boosting its earnings per share.
"The buyback shows the company's bullish view on its stock," said Rebecca Lin, who helps manages the equivalent of US$4.2 billion in stocks at Prudential Securities Investment Trust Co (保誠投信).
NT dollar trades lower
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.341 to close at the day's low of NT$34.051 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$1.1 billion.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to