Japan's biggest home-delivery service provider, Yamato Trans-port Co, yesterday announced plans to form a joint venture with a local company, making it the first foreign business entity to invest in the nation's transport industry after relevant regulations were amended late last year.
Grabbing a 40-percent market share with 1 billion packages delivered in Japan last year, Yamato decided to buy a 10 percent share of President Transnet Corp (
"As we have cooperated with President Transnet for a long time with the same business goal, we've realized that this Taiwanese company is a favorable investment target for us and therefore decided to push forward the joint-venture project after regulations were relaxed last year," Yamato's president Atsushi Yamazaki said at a contract-signing ceremony in Taipei yesterday.
In the ceremony yesterday, Jason Lin (林蒼生), chief executive officer of Uni-President Group (統一集團) -- the parent company of President Transnet -- said the deal would give Yamato 10 percent of President Transnet's NT$1 billion capital. Uni-President Group retains its 20 percent share, while President Chain Store Corp's (統一超商) share drops from 80 percent to 70 percent.
Saying that this joint venture signifies Yamato's approval and recognition of President Transnet's business performance, Lin added that the transnational cooperation would help consumers in Taiwan as well as Japan to obtain or transport farm produce, aquatic products and specialty goods much easier.
After regulations in the Highway Law (
Japan's Sagawa Express Co is in talks with Taiwan's Hsin Chu Trans (
Another Japanese distribution company, Nippon Express, has also shown interest in investing in Taiwan Pelican Express Co (
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