The finances of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower,
"We still have no precise statistics on our total losses, as flood water in the Chingshan and Tehchi plant still has not completely run off, but I think it will not exceed NT$10 billion in total," Taipower Spokesman Lee Jiin-tyan (李錦田) said.
Heavy rains and mudflows caused by Mindulle inundated the three power plants along the Tachia River in Taichung County, submerging the Chingshan plant and ruining part of the infrastructure at the Tehchi and Tienlun plants.
Repairs and reconstruction at the plants fall under capital expenditure, and therefore should not dent the company's operational and finance report this year, Lee said.
Tony Tsai (蔡東松), an analyst with Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評), a local unit of Standard and Poor's Rating Services, said the corporation will not downgrade Taipower's rating because of the damage.
Taiwan Ratings gave Taipower a stable corporate credit rating of "twAAA," and a short-term rating of "twA-1" in February, given that Taipower still enjoys a monopoly in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in the country.
Taipower is 97-percent owned by the government. With total capital assets of NT$1.2 trillion, the losses at the three power plants are relatively minor for Taipower, Tsai said
These plants account for less than 2 percent of Taipower's installed capacity, which can be easily replaced by nuclear power. However, the damage makes it harder for the company to attain the profit it is required to turn in to the government treasury this year, he said.
Taipower has already come under pressure due to several fuel price hikes this year, Lee said.
The price of coal imported from Australia, for example, has surged from US$25 per metric tonne to US$60 per tonne, Lee said.
Oil prices and shipping charges have also increased, which adds NT$21.2 billion to the company's fuel expenses, he said.
Taipower needs to turn in NT$15.6 billion to the government this year, but for the first four months of the year, Taipower reported NT$484 million of pre-tax income, which is NT$1.96 billion short of the goal set by the government. Among a number of state-run enterprises managed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taipower and Aerospace Industrial Development Corp (漢翔) were the two firms that failed to attain their goals.
Despite the negative circumstances, Lee said that Taipower has no plans to raise electricity prices, which have been fixed at their current level for over a decade.
"We are waiting for better timing to hike the prices ... after all, it will affect the whole nation. So before we consider hiking prices, we'll try to bring down our costs as much as possible," Lee said.
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
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
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],”
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