■ ITRI wins award
The Industrial Technology Research Institute's (ITRI, 工研院) Incubator Center was awarded the 2006 Randall M. Whaley Incubator of the Year Award by the National Business Incubation Association, according to a statement released yesterday. ITRI is the first Asian institution to win the award at the asso-ciation's 20th International Conference on Business Incubation in St. Louis, the statement said. The award is the association's most prestigious honor that recognizes overall incubator excellence. Opened in Hsinchu in 1996, the ITRI Incubator Center offers clients nearly 13,000m2 of space, which they can use for offices or research facilities. It also provides expertise, networks and tools for entrepreneurs. Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙), president of ITRI, said the center had so far helped create 140 companies with a total investment of NT$47 billion. ITRI-assisted companies include Phison Electronics Corp (群聯電子), which in 2001 developed the Pen Drive, the world's first USB flash removable disk.
■ Macquarie allowed to buy TBC
Macquarie Media Group, Aus-tralia's biggest commercial radio operator, said it had obtained the approval from Taiwan's Investment Commission to acquire Taiwan Broadband Communications (台灣寬頻通訊), Taiwan's third-largest cable TV provider and a broadband provider, from Carlyle Group, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday. The A$1.19 billion (US$916 million) deal will be undertaken by a consortium made up of the group and one of its shareholders, Macquarie Bank Ltd, the report said. The acquisition is expected to be settled within the next week, it said. The group said it wants to increase the range of services it provides to its current 90,000 Internet and 650,000 cable TV subscribers. Carlyle, a US buyout firm, bought Taiwan Broadband in 1999 for about US$200 million.
■ Chipmakers ordering again
Taiwanese chipmakers that put off capacity increases last year are starting to order again, said Stephen Newberry, chief executive officer of Lam Research Corp. "The foundries are coming back," he said in an interview. "That's making for a wafer-fab equipment market that we expect will be up somewhere around 22 percent to 25 percent this year." Companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) and United Microelectronics Corp (聯電) spent last year finding work for new plants and equipment that they added the previous year, Newberry said. The worldwide market for chip equipment shrank 11 percent to US$33 billion last year.
■ Nanya Technology's margins up
Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技), the nation's biggest memory-chip maker, said its gross margin in the second quarter will probably rise from the previous three months because of higher product prices. Gross margin rose to 24 percent in the first quarter from 18 percent in the final three months of last year, the company said on April 18. "The second quarter has been better than we expected," Nanya Technology vice president Pai Pei-lin (白培霖), said yesterday. "De-mand is improving for June and prices will in turn rise."
■ Citigroup hires `Mr. Taiwan'
Citigroup Inc has hired Peter Kurz from BNP Paribas SA to head its equity research in Taiwan. Kurz was dubbed "Mr. Taiwan" by local media while at Merrill Lynch & Co for his fluency in Mandarin and familiarity with the country. He often appears in the media as a commentator. Kurz, who will replace Kent Chan (陳衛斌), will start work in Taipei next month.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”