The Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) has set its sights on pushing up exports of telecommunications and textile products in a bid to revive the country's sliding outbound shipments, a board spokesman said yesterday.
The board has invited foreign buyers to visit exhibitions such as the annual Taipei Innovative Textile Application Show (TITAS) and the Computex Taipei show, the spokesman said, adding that trade promotion delegations have also been organized to boost sales overseas.
The activities have gradually borne fruit, as this year's TITAS and Computex shows both drew large numbers of foreign buyers, the official said.
More than 2,000 foreign buyers visited TITAS from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, including executives from companies such as Nike and Stafnal. Orders worth US$3.04 million were placed with domestic companies on the spot, while the value of follow-up orders were estimated at around US$15 million.
The elimination of a global quota system at the beginning of this year was widely believed to impact Taiwan's textile industry due to aggressive competition from China, and it has increasingly shifted focus to value-added functional products, he said.
The two categories of products have shown heavy declines in exports since the start of this year, with the total value of telecommunications exports for the first nine months dwindling by 20 percent year on year to US$7.562 billion.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last