■ Taiwan Mobile sells Chunghwa
Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), the nation's second-biggest mobile phone operator, said yesterday that it sold 10.3 million shares in competitor Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) for NT$608 million (US$18.7 million). The company sold the shares between last Friday and Monday at an average price of NT$58.91 each, Taiwan Mobile said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp. The Taipei-based company will book a NT$129.3 million profit from the disposal, it said. The company plans to unload 200 million shares, or about 2 percent, of Chunghwa Telecom this year, Taiwan Mobile president Harvey Chang (張孝威) announced on Jan. 22. Shares of Chunghwa Telecom on Monday climbed 0.2 percent to NT$59.30. Taiwan Mobile also added 0.2 percent, to NT$30. Taiwan's markets were closed yesterday for a national holiday.
■ Sony Ericsson eyes Q2 launch
Sony Ericsson Mobile Commun-ications Ltd, the world's fifth largest mobile-phone maker, will start selling camera phones with Sony's Cyber-shot brand and handsets with Google Inc blog and Web search functions. The company will start selling the K800 and K790 Cyber-shot handsets in the second quarter, according to a release yesterday from the London-based company. The company also introduced four other phones. Sony Ericsson, which sells music phones under the Walkman brand, is betting on the familiarity of Sony consumer products and the Google brand to fend off competitors. The company was overtaken by LG Electronics Inc last quarter and dropped to fifth place, according to researcher Gartner Inc.
■ CEPD sees end to Fed rate hikes
The US Federal Reserve is not expected to increase the federal funds rate sharply in the coming months and will likely halt the trend by mid-year after raising it to 4.5 percent at the end of January, the Council of Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said yesterday. The council said that to stop the US economy from overheating and to curb inflation caused by soaring oil prices, the Fed continually raised its federal interest rates last year from 2.25 percent in January to 4.25 percent last December. The rate-hiking moves of the US affected central banks in Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand, who responded in kind to keep their consumer prices in check and in order to stabilize their economies. The council said a series of rate increases in the US has raised borrowing costs and stamped consumer spending, causing concerns that shrinking US domestic consumption could cut a dent in the global trade. The council quoted the Federal Reserve Board's Feb. 21 meeting records as saying the US interest rate has reached a certain level, beyond which the Fed may not raise the rate by a substantive margin. The council forecast the Fed would likely stop raising rates by the middle of this year.
■ Cathay Life unit opens branch
Cathay Life Insurance Corp (國泰人壽), Taiwan's largest life insurer, announced yesterday that its Chinese subsidiary based in Shanghai opened the first branch in Jiangsu Province. Jiangsu, which enjoys GDP per capital of US$3,000 and a leading insurance market scale, is a place to be for insurance companies, Cathay Life said in a statement. Cathay Life broke into China's insurance market by forming a joint venture with China Eastern Air Holding Co (中國東方航空) early last year. The life insurance joint venture created a first-year premium income of 180 million yuan (US$22.4 million) last year, and ranked 14th out of 22 life insurers in Shanghai, Cathay Life said last month.
■ ATM card shift begins today
The Financial Supervisory Com-mission yesterday reminded consumers that as of today, magnetic strip cards for automatic teller machines (ATMs) will be no longer effective on all ATMs nationwide, but only for those machines set up by the issuing bank. The use of ATM magnetic-strip cards will be restricted to cash withdrawals, account checks, taxes and other payments, as well as account transfers to the card issuer and other banks, on the ATMs installed by the card issuer.
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],”
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
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