The nation's furniture industry is slowly leaving behind a painful transitional period, with total exports reaching US$1.28 billion last year, Taiwan Furniture Manufacturers' Association (台灣區家具工業同業公會) chairman Chen Chiu (陳丘) said yesterday at the opening of the 2006 Taipei International Furniture Show.
Chen said furniture exports used to be hurt by competition from China and other Southeast Asian countries, but with the efforts of local manufacturers, the industry has been revived.
The furniture industry has continued strengthening its R&D, upgrading production techniques and producing creative designs, and has oriented itself toward original design manufacturing and original brand manufacturing products rather than the traditional role of original equipment manufacturing, Chen said.
Chen made the statement at the opening of the show at the Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall I. The show will run through Saturday.
The show hosts 211 exhibitors occupying more than 1,300 booths.
It is expected to attract around 1,500 foreign buyers and more than 20,000 local buyers.
It has been six years since the last Taipei International Furniture Show was held.
The organizers said Taiwanese furniture manufacturers export around US$1.3 billion in product annually, using glass and metal as their principal raw materials, while those using wood are based abroad and export around US$7 billion in goods per year.
The organizers said they were striving toward making Taiwan the "quality furniture center of Asia."
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to