Mandarin Airlines (
Mandarin Airlines is choosing between the 737-700 model made by Boeing Co, the A319 made by Airbus SAS and the Embraer 190 made by Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica SA to replace its 11 Fokker planes, the carrier's Chairman, Michael Lo, (
"We're conducting an intensive study now," Lo said yesterday.
"We'll talk with banks and leasing companies on whether to buy or lease them," he said.
Mandarin Airlines is seeking to expand capacity, like other Asian carriers including Cathay Pacific, to tap rising travel demand and lower costs with fuel-efficient planes amid rising oil prices.
The planes may be used to fly to regional destinations, including Seoul, Hong Kong, Cebu island in the Philippines and Myanmar's capital Yangon. The airline will make a decision by May, taking delivery of the first aircraft in April next year and receiving all of them before the end of 2009, Lo said.
Mandarin Airlines' fleet includes three leased Boeing 737-800 planes, six Fokker-100s and five Fokker-50s, Mandarin Airlines' spokeswoman Linda Hsiao (
Meanwhile, China Airlines Ltd (CAL,
Profit down
CAL posted a NT$500 million (US$15.43 million) net profit last year, compared with NT$4.18 billion in 2004, the company said.
Pretax profit last year was down to NT$700 million from NT$4 billion in the previous year, while sales rose to NT$108.69 billion from NT$96.18 billion.
The earnings fall was largely due to higher fuel costs amid a spike in crude oil prices, a company official said.
The official said its cargo operations registered a loading factor of over 70 percent in January and 60 percent last month.
Its current loading factor stands at over 90 percent.
"The company's cargo segment contributed to about 80 percent of the company's total profits last year," he said.
"The cargo business is seen bringing in more than NT$50 billion of revenue this year, against NT$48 billion last year," he said.
Meanwhile, six new aircraft are expected to join company operations this year.
"We are slated to take delivery of four new A330-300 passenger jets and two B747-400F freighters this year," company chairman Philip Wei (魏幸雄) said, adding CAL is due to retire four A300-600R passenger aircraft.
CAL owns a fleet of 66 airplanes with an average age of 4.9 years.
Wei said the company is also seeking new routes to Japan and targets 1,800 charter flights for passenger services to the country this year.
Wei added CAL plans to invest NT$3 billion to NT$4 billion to build a new headquarters, a training center and a crew center close to CKS airport in Taoyuan, south of Taipei.
"We plan to relocate our headquarters from Taipei city to the airport area in 2009 or 2010 and lease the current headquarters [to generate incomes]."
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS