■ Huang to fill APEC post
Theodore Huang (黃茂雄), president of the National Association of Industry and Commerce (工商協進會), has consented to serve as a representative of the APEC Business Advisory Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Huang, also chairman of the TECO group (東元), will fill the vacancy left by Sayling Wen (溫世仁), late vice chairman of Inventec Co (英業達) who died last December, the ministry said.
The other two council representatives are Jeffrey Koo (辜濂松), chairman of Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金控) and Henry Kao (高志尚), vice chairman of I-Mei Foods Co (義美食品).
The council is an advisory agency under APEC which serves to solicit the views of the business sector among APEC members for reference. Each APEC member can recommend three representatives to the council.
■ Foreign reserves rise
Foreign-currency reserves, the third-highest in the world, rose for the 37th month to a record US$230.4 billion last month, the central bank said.
The reserves -- rising 0.1 percent from US$230.09 billion in June and an increase of US$23.77 billion from the end of 2003 -- mainly reflect returns from foreign exchange reserve management, the central bank said in a statement.
Taiwan accounted for about 7 percent of global reserves. Japan, with US$798.6 billion, had a quarter of the worldwide total at the end of June. China had US$470.6 billion, or 14 percent of the total.
■ Handset output up five-fold
Taiwanese mobile handset makers churned out approximately 12.6 million units in the second quarter of the year, a five-fold increase compared with the SARS-affected second quarter of 2003, the government-funded research house Market Intelligence Center (市場情報中心) said in a statement yesterday.
Boosted by the volume growth, handset output in terms of sales reached US$830 million in the second quarter, up 50 percent from a year ago while down 16.5 percent from the previous quarter, the center said.
But the shipment volume of Taiwanese mobile phones is expected to edge down one percent to approximately 12.5 million units in the third quarter, as both Western Europe and North America enter a slow season while markets in China and India are expected to see a weak demand for new handsets, according to the statement.
Taiwanese makers' share of global mobile phone shipments stood at 8.4 percent in the second quarter of the year.
■ Singapore firm wins contract
Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd's electronics unit said it won a S$61.4 million (US$36 million) contract to build a radio communications system for Taiwan's railway.
Singapore Technologies Electronics, a unit of Southeast Asia's largest defense company, will build and install a digital communications system in the rail network of Taipei, to be finished by 2012.
The contract allows Singapore Technologies Electronics to "strengthen our position" in Asia's rail system upgrades, said company President Seah Moon Ming, in a statement to the stock exchange.
Singapore Technologies Electronics has worked on Taiwan's rail projects since 1993
■ Taiwan dollar advances
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday traded higher against its US counterpart, advancing NT$0.018 to close at NT$34.155 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$492 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