Several foreign shipping companies are vying for the contract to build a deep-water terminal at Taiwan's Kaohsiung Harbour, a harbor official said yesterday.
"Maersk, APL, NYK and HMM are all interested in building the 16m-deep Intercontinental Container Terminal. We will invite tenders in October and announce the winner in June next year," a Kaohsiung Harbor official told reporters, asking not to be named.
"Construction of the terminal will begin in 2007. The first wharf will begin operating in 2011 and the other three wharves will begin operating in 2013," he said.
The new terminal, with four 370m wharves, will handle at least 2 million TEUs (20-Foot Equivalent Units) each year.
"Under the BOT [build, operate, transfer] arrangement, the contractor will design and build the terminal and operate it for 50 years. Construction cost is estimated at NT$12.3 billion [US$3.8 million]," the harbor official said.
Kaohsiung Harbor was the world's busiest container port in 1999, but its ranking has fallen due to the expansion of neighboring ports and Taiwan's five-decade ban on direct shipping with China.
Currently Kaohsiung Harbor is the world's sixth-largest container port after Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Busan.
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