■ Five agencies to be merged
The Financial Supervisory Com-mission (FSC) said yesterday that the government will merge the Taiwan Stock Exchange, Taiwan Futures Exchange, Gretai Securities Market, Taiwan Securities Central Depository and Debt Instruments Depository and Clearing into one company through share swaps by the end of this year. Details of the proposed five-in-one merger will be released in June with the merger expected to be finalized by year-end, FSC chairman Kong Jaw-sheng (龔照勝) said. The proposed merger is designed to help the local market catch up with the international trend and boost operational efficiency, Kong said. The merged entity will eventually be transformed into a holding company, Kong said, citing that South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong have also adopted the holding company system to regulate their respective equities markets.
■ Sony to contract out cameras
Sony is in negotiations with a number of Taiwan manufacturers, including Premier Image Technol-ogy Corp (普立爾), as the Japanese company seeks to relocate some of its digital-camera production to Taiwan, the Jiji Press news agency reported yesterday. If the negotiations are successful, Sony could bring digital cameras made in Taiwan onto the market in the second half of the 2006 fiscal year, which begins on April 1, it said.
■ TAIEX down on profit-taking
Share prices closed 0.15 percent lower yesterday after Wall Street-driven gains gave way to profit-taking in late trade, dealers said. The TAIEX was down 10.28 points at 6,725.61, on turnover of NT$143.40 billion (US$4.47 billion).
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
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
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],”
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