■ IBM Taiwan has new GM
IBM Taiwan Corp has appointed Sophia Tong (童至祥) as its new country general manager, the company said in a statement yesterday. Tong will oversee sales, procurement as well as research and development. Before her new post, Tong was the director for China banking clusters at IBM Greater China Group, according to the statement. After joining IBM Taiwan in 1981, Tong has had experience working in China and Taiwan and managing business segments including hardware, public sector and financial services. Outgoing country general manager Jason Hsu (許朱勝) will be stationed in Beijing as vice president of banking transformation services, the statement said.
■ Kaohsiung port cargo slipping
Kaohsiung's port handled 9,471,056 TEUs (20 feet equivalent unit) of cargo last year, down 2.5 percent from 9,710,411 TEUs in 2004, marking the first drop in 14 years, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday.
The Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau noted that the volume of cargo handled by the harbor grew annually between 1991 and 2004, but after ports in China began to attract customers, growth had begun to slip, although there was still modest growth in certain sections.
Ministry officials expressed concern over the fact that Xiamen Harbor, which has established offshore transshipping links with Kaohsiung, is constructing three deep-water wharves.
After the wharves open next year, containers will no longer have to detour to Kaohsiung. The harbor will then face an annual loss of 600,000 TEUs in cargo.
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],”
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
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