■ Executives indicted
Shinkong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) chairman Eugene Wu (吳東進) and his finacial adviser Wu Tung-hsiung (吳統雄) were indicted yesterday by the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on suspicion of insider trading, after the collapsed merger between Shinkong Financial and Taishin Financial Holdings Co (台新金控) in 2002. The two companies announced on June 25, 2002, that they would merge in a share swap deal. But to facilitate the deal, Taishin had asked Shinkong to set aside an additional NT$19.6 billion to cover potential losses stemming from higher insurance policy claims. Because of the additional provision, Shinkong later decided to report an after-tax loss of NT$8.82 billion instead of an earlier forecast of NT$3.96 billion profit that year, which angering Taishin, which called off the merger on July 3 the same year. Prosecutors accused Eugene Wu and Wu Tung-hsiung of insider trading of stocks, as they allegedly sold the Shinkong shares they owned two weeks before the announcement of revised financial forecast. Taishin chairman Thomas Wu (吳東亮) is the younger brother of Eugene Wu.
■ CAL, Delta share codes
Taiwan's leading carrier China Airlines (CAL, 華航) said yesterday it will expand code-sharing services with US-based Delta Air Lines starting Monday. CAL will add three additional code-sharing destinations on Delta flights from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa while Delta will place its codes on CAL flights from Taipei to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, it said. The new services will allow passengers to fly to Atlanta, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa via Los Angeles, or from San Francisco to Atlanta, or from Honolulu to Los Angeles and San Francisco. CAL will operate 13 destinations in the US after the expanded code-sharing. Meanwhile, Delta will place its codes on CAL flights from Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York (JFK), San Francisco and Seattle to Taipei, and onward to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
■ E-mail filter launched
New e-mail filtering software developed by two domestic universities was launched yesterday, with its creators claiming it can filter some 97 percent of junk mails, the National Chung Cheng University (NCCU) announced. According to Kuo Yao-huang (郭耀煌), the software, dubbed "Nopam, " was jointly developed by NCCU and National Tsinghua University, and can handle more than 1 million e-mails in Intel Pentium 4 computers per day, with the error margin of less than 0.01 percent. This software will be offered to various schools or academic sectors of the country for free, Kuo said, adding that he is proud of the achievement. NCCU Professor Lee Hsing-lin (李新林) noted that the research and development of computer software is quite difficult in Taiwan, as few entrepreneurs are willing to dedicate themselves to this area, and therefore it needs long-term efforts. Wu Sheng (吳昇), director of NCCU's Internet center, said some junk mails are disguised in different versions to elude e-mail filtering software, but Nopam can compare the sources, contents, titles, the similarity, or whether they are sent in quantities to find these junk mails.
■ NT dollar gains
The New Taiwan dollar continued gaining ground against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.013 to close at NT$31.892 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$597 million, down from US$753 million the previous day.
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