Wives uninterested in work
Married women in Taiwan have little interest in seeking employment, with only 6 percent of female married job-seekers registering with the leading job search Web site www.104.com.tw, according to tallies released yesterday.
Of the 230,000 registered job seekers, only 14,377 are married women, the Web site reported.
Of the professions in which married women had expressed an interest, administration and general affairs accounted for 47.3 percent, followed by finance and accounting (29.5 percent), production and manufacturing (28.6 percent), and sales and trade (20 percent).
EU should help Taiwan firms
If the Slovakian government could help Taiwanese manufacturers establish factories in regions within an hour's of drive of its capital, Bratislava, Minister of Economic Affairs Ho Mei-yueh (何美玥) said more Taiwanese manufacturers would consider investing in the Eastern European country.
Bratislava is only a 30-minute drive from Vienna, Austria and that there are direct flights between Taipei and Vienna, Ho said.
Ho made the remark after returned yesterday from a visit to three European countries.
Leading a 44-member delegation composed of government officials and business executives, Ho visited Slovakia, Sweden and Finland during her 10-day visit.
LCD monitor prices increase
Prices of liquid-crystal displays used in monitors rose this month, according to Taipei-based market researcher WitsView Technology Corp (聯景科技).
Prices of LCD monitors measuring 17 inches diagonally, the most widely used variety, rose US$5 to US$165 because of increasing demand, the researcher said, citing a survey for the first half of May. Prices of 19-inch monitor panels rose by US$5 to US$220, while 15-inch panel prices increased by US$3 to US$125, it said.
Motorola to set up R&D center
Motorola Inc will invest about NT$2 billion (US$64 million) to set up a global broadband research and development center near Taipei this year, Simon Leung (梁念堅), Motorola's Asia-Pacific president, said Thursday in Taipei.
This would be Motorola's second research center in Taiwan after the company set up its first last year to focus on development in mobile phones and batteries.
Motorola will purchase more than US$2 billion of products from Taiwan companies this year, focusing on mobile handsets and telecommunications parts and components, according to Leung.
Last year, Motorola bought US$2 billion of products from Taiwan, up 90 percent from a year earlier.
Yuanta denies purchase report
Kim Eng Holdings Ltd (金英控股) said Yuanta Core Pacific Securities Co (元大京華證券), a Taiwanese brokerage that is its largest shareholder, has denied a Chinese-language newspaper report that Yuanta plans to buy the shares it doesn't own in Kim Eng.
Yuanta's management has "denied the contents of the article," Kim Eng said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The report said Taipei-based Yuanta plans to buy the remaining shares in Kim Eng, Singapore's biggest publicly traded stock brokerage, by the second half of this year to expand overseas.
Yuanta, Taiwan's largest securities brokerage, holds a 27.9 percent stake in Kim Eng.
NT dollar dips slightly
The New Taiwan dollar traded lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.020 to close at NT$31.160 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$714 million.
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Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by