Raytheon Co, the world's largest missile maker, said it's seeking partners among Taiwan companies and plans to set up a maintenance-repair center on the island.
"Over the past four decades, we just sold products to Taiwan, but have yet to establish partnership here," Torkel Patterson, president of Raytheon International, Inc, said yesterday in Taipei, where the company is holding an exhibition.
Raytheon is among 18 overseas and 56 local exhibitors participating Aug. 11-14 at the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition.
PHOTO: AP
The company, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is cooperating with Taiwan's government-backed Institute for Information Industry to jointly develop air traffic control systems, said Patterson, who didn't elaborate.
The Cabinet is proposing a budget of NT$480 billion (US$15 billion) for the next 15 years to buy submarines, anti-missile equipment and anti-submarine aircraft. The proposal, scaled back by 21 percent from a larger plan, is pending in Legislative Yuan after lawmakers balked at the original request.
"We hope to grab some of the orders," Patterson said, without elaborating.
Taiwan said it needs to increase defense spending because of rising tensions and military threats from China, which has 706 missiles aimed at Taiwan and is adding 120 more each year.
Excluding arms purchases, Taiwan has budgeted about NT$267 million for defense spending this year, or about 17 percent of the total.
The nation's annual defense budget last year accounted for 2.8 percent of gross domestic product, less than South Korea's 3 percent, the US's 4 percent, Singapore's 4.3 percent and Israel's 8 percent, the presidential office said in 2004.
Raytheon doesn't have a timetable for its Taiwan maintenance-repair center, Communication Manager Paul Stefens said. The company on June 23 received a US Air Force contract valued at US$752 million to provide Taiwan with an early-warning radar system.
The system will enable the Taiwan Air Force to detect and track ballistic and cruise missiles as well as aircraft and ships.
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],”
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
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