■ Sports lottery up for grabs
The Ministry of Finance plans to hold a public bidding for the nation's first sports lottery in the second half of the year, officials said yesterday. This decision is considered to be a setback to Chinatrust Financial Holding Co (中信金控), which will become the operator of the public welfare lottery next year. The ministry's National Treasury Agency said that although the government had originally planned to have the sports and public welfare lotteries issued by the same operator, it reconsidered after several financial institutions expressed interest in selling the lucrative sports lottery tickets. The sports lottery will still go into operation on July 1 next year as planned.
■ Chi Mei to control Leadtek
Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp (奇美電子) said yesterday it plans to spend US$40 million to buy the remaining stake in an overseas venture capital firm, Leadtek Global Group Ltd, through which the nation's No. 2 flat-panel maker would gain total control over a liquid-crystal-display assembly plant in China. Chi Mei's move came after the government approved its application to invest an additional US$30 million in Ningbo Chi Mei Optoelectronics Ltd (寧波奇美電子) late last month. To save cost, Chi Mei has already spent US$60 million on acquiring a major stake in the Ningbo factory, as well as equipment from the Chinese company Westinghouse Digital Electronics (Ningbo) Ltd (寧波華屋). The company also planned to spend US$30 million to build a LCD television assembly plant in China's Guangdong Province, the statement said.
■ SinoPac eyes bigger profits
SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (建華金控), the nation's eighth-largest financial holding company by market value, hopes to grow its net profit for this year by more than 70 percent to NT$10 billion (US$309 million) on gains from overseas operations and its domestic wealth management business. SinoPac acknowledged the negative impact of rising non-performing loans from credit and cash cards, although its position was better than some other local banks, SinoPac chairman Ho Shou-chuan (何壽川) said in an interview on Tuesday. "We'll still keep a target of achieving NT$10 billion," Ho said, referring to profit. "We'll move to wealth management and increase overseas contributions to make up the losses from the credit card department," Ho said. Taipei-based SinoPac's gains from operations in the US, Vietnam and Hong Kong accounted for some 25 percent of its profit last year, Ho said. He expects the overseas profit contribution to rise to 30 percent.
■ Chunghwa Telecom to upgrade
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) plans to spend as much as NT$130 billion (US$4 billion) to build a network combining fixed-line, cellphone and Internet services, the Economic Daily News said, citing John Hsueh (薛紀建), a vice president of the nation's largest provider of phone services. The company will build its "next-generation network" by 2013, the newspaper reported Hsueh as saying. Chunghwa Telecom has been in contact with Lucent Technologies Inc, Siemens AG and Nortel Networks Corp to discuss testing and buying equipment for the project, the Taipei-based, Chinese-language newspaper said.
■ NT dollar firms up
The New Taiwan dollar traded firmer against its US counterpart yesterday, advancing NT$0.034 to close at NT$32.498 on the Taipei foreign exchange market. Turnover was US$983 million.
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],”
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
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