Singapore Airlines yesterday announced that it is raising fuel surcharges to offset the impact from surging jet-fuel costs.
Starting yesterday, the fuel surcharge for flights between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur will be increased from US$4 to US$10 per sector, the company said in a statement.
All long-haul flights, including the Taipei-Los Angeles route, will see the surcharge increase from US$22 to US$30 per sector, starting on Friday.
A sector is a single journey including refueling stops.
Despite the adjustment, the company said it will still not be able to cover the increased costs from recent record prices for jet fuel. At US$70 per barrel, the additional fuel cost to the airline will be in excess of US$300 million for the 2005-2006 financial year.
The price of jet fuel has risen steadily, to more than US$70 per barrel last month from US$58 per barrel in November last year, when the current surcharge was set. Crude oil prices have seen smaller increases, rising to US$52 per barrel from US$49 per barrel over the same period.
Surcharges will remain unchanged at US$12 for the Taipei-Singapore flight, and US$10 for all flights between Singapore and Bandar Seri Begawan, Bangkok, Manila, Penang, Jakarta, Surabaya, Denpasar, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
According to statistics provided by the International Air Transport Association on April 4, soaring fuel costs may result in combined losses of US$5.5 billion this year for airlines worldwide, based on an average price for crude oil of US$43 a barrel.
Domestic carriers, including China Airlines (華航) and Eva Airways Corp (長榮), said they have no plans to follow suit, although rising fuel costs are putting pressure on company profits.
Meanwhile, the nation's four smaller air carriers -- TransAsia Airways (
"Following negotiations with the Civil Aeronautics Administration since the end of last year, we expect that our applications will get the go-ahead next month to cover rising fuel costs," said Hanson Chang (
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