China Airlines Co (
Under the program, the two carriers can sell seats on each other's trans-Pacific flights.
The partnership helps bring Delta Air back to Taiwan after it pulled out of the country nine years ago.
"Taiwan is a market filled with opportunity, with growth in tourism and rapidly expanding trade," Paul Matsen, a Delta senior vice president, told reporters in Taipei yesterday.
"We hope to expand the cooperation to include destinations beyond the Taiwan carrier's hub," Matsen said.
As of today, Delta will use its code for China Airlines flights from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Seattle and New York (JFK) to Taipei.
In June last year, China Airlines began to use its code for Delta flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Atlanta, Dallas, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Honolulu .
"The agreement is a milestone for us, indicating that Delta, the world's second-largest airline [by passengers carried], trusts us and is willing to put its customers in our hands," said Philip Wei (
Burt Pinoli, general manager of Delta's Asia division, based in Beijing, told the Taipei Times yesterday that Delta is anxious to re-enter the Taiwan market.
The US carrier left Taiwan at the end of 1995, when the US airline industry was experiencing a downturn.
"We view Taiwan, as well as the whole of Asia, as a very important area considering the strong economic growth in recent years. For Delta, the best thing to do is to make partnerships, as we have a limited presence in the region on our own," Pinoli said.
China, the world's fastest growing economy, is a main target for Delta to fly its own service, Pinoli said.
Delta has a code-sharing agreement with China Southern Airlines Co (中國南方航空) on the Los Angeles-Guangzhou route.
The carrier hopes to add Chinese destinations, either by using their planes or through code-sharing with Chinese carriers, Pinoli said.
But the plan may not be realized in the near term, as the US authorities are still negotiating with their Chinese counterparts on opening more destinations for US carriers.
Delta early last month announced a first-quarter net loss of US$383 million, or US$3.12 a share.
The first-quarter result was an improvement from a year ago, when Delta had a net loss of US$466 million, or US$3.81 a share.
Last year Delta started a discount service, Song, which Pinoli said had seen good results.
The US aviation industry has been struggling to recover from a series of setbacks: the Sept. 11 attacks, the SARS outbreak, the US-led war against Iraq and now soaring fuel costs.
Pinoli added that the growing popularity of low-cost carriers is a threat to the large, established airlines in the US.
"We hope to continue to develop this sector, while providing our original full service to customers," Pinoli said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last