VMEP to expand in Vietnam
The Vietnamese government has allowed Taiwanese manufacturer VMEP to expand from assembling motorbikes to making light trucks and minibuses, a government official said.
Vietnam Manufacturing Export Processing Co (VMEP), which is controlled by the Chinfon group (慶豐), plans to build a new automobile plant with an annual capacity of 10,000 vehicles, the Industry Ministry official told Dow Jones Newswires.
VMEP will add US$70 million to its existing US$160 million investment to make light trucks, small buses and passenger cars of six to eight seats, he said.
Energy use drops slightly
Energy consumption fell 1.2 percent from a year earlier in April as factories used less energy, the government said. The nation burned the equivalent of 8.29 million kiloliters of oil in April, with industrial companies, including manufacturers, accounting for 58 percent of that consumption, the Bureau of Energy said on its Web site yesterday. Industrial companies used 1.2 percent less energy in April, the bureau said.
The nation used 16.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in April, 1.7 percent more than the same month last year, the bureau said.
NT dollar declines
The New Taiwan dollar traded lower against its US counterpart, declining NT$0.046 to close at NT$31.425 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$750 million, up from US$617 million on Monday.
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