Chinese Petroleum Corp (
Chinese Petroleum expects to complete a final assessment of the project this month, company president Chen Bao-lang (陳寶郎) told reporters in Taipei. Chinese Petroleum wants partners to fund more than 50 percent of the proposed oil and chemicals plant, he said, without naming any potential partners.
The company plans to build a petrochemicals complex and oil refinery in Yunlin County on the west coast to tap rising demand for fuels and chemicals used to make plastics. The project may also help the company compete with Formosa Plastics Group (台塑), Taiwan's only other oil refiner, which has newer plants and is also adding additional capacity.
Chinese Petroleum may build a refinery that can process 300,000 barrels of crude oil a day, the company said. The project may also include a chemical unit with capacity to process naphtha into 1.2 million metric tonnes of ethylene a year.
Chinese Petroleum wants to boost petrochemicals sales because the domestic market for oil products is saturated, Chen said.
Chinese Petroleum also plans to spend NT$42.6 billion building a plant in Kaohsiung County that will produce 1 million tonnes of ethylene a year when completed in 2011, to replace an existing unit.
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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained