German liquid crystal manufacturer Merck KgaA will spend NT$900 million (US$26.8 million) to build a plant in Taiwan to supply local screen makers, a Chinese-language newspaper reported yesterday.
The ground-breaking ceremony for the new plant in Taoyuan County is scheduled for June 25, the paper said.
The plant will help reduce production costs for Taiwan's five flat-panel display makers, including industry leaders AU Optronics Corp (
Taiwan's top five makers of thin-film-transistor liquid crystal display panels are expected to generate combined revenues of more than NT$500 billion this year, the newspaper said. Their demand for liquid crystal materials is estimated at NT$11 billion.
Merck, the world's biggest supplier of materials used in making liquid crystal displays, said Monday it would expand Asian liquid crystal production as demand increases until at least 2008.
The German company controls about 60 percent of the world's liquid crystals materials market, while Japanese rivals Chisso and Dainippon Inc hold the rest.
Merck will spend 30 million euros (US$36 million) this year to increase output in Japan and South Korea and to build a new plant in Taiwan, the company said in a release on its Web site on Monday.
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
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day