■ Nokia wins Chunghwa order
Nokia Oyj, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, won an order to expand the wireless network of Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation's biggest phone company.
Nokia will expand Chunghwa's network that uses the so-called wideband code-division multiple access technology, or WCDMA, and also provide related services, the Espoo, Finland-based company said in an e-mailed release on Tuesday. Deliveries will start immediately. Nokia didn't give a value for the contract.
■ Taiwan Mobile profits from sale
Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), the nation's second-biggest mobile phone operator, said it would book a NT$124 million (US$3.8 million) profit from selling 9.26 million shares in its bigger competitor Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信).
Taiwan Mobile sold the shares on Tuesday and yesterday for a total of NT$556 million, or an average price of NT$60.07 a share, the company said in a filing yesterday to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Taiwan Mobile is planning to sell 200 million Chunghwa Telecom shares, or about 2 percent of the nation's largest phone company, this year, the Economic Daily News said on Jan. 23, citing Taiwan Mobile president Harvey Chang (張孝威).
Shares of Chunghwa Telecom rose 1.2 percent yesterday to NT$60.90. Taiwan Mobile's shares fell 0.5 percent to NT$31.35.
■ Tax revenues fell last month
The treasury took in NT$93.5 billion (US$2.9 billion) worth of taxes last month, a 1.7 percent decrease from a year ago, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
The biggest drop was recorded in income tax revenues, which slid NT$3.4 billion, or 59.9 percent, from last year as a growing number of people filed their annual tax reports on the Internet and became the first group to receive tax rebates last month, said Lee Li-shu (李麗雪), director of the statistics department.
Income from the securities transaction tax dropped by 12.2 percent to NT$5.8 billion last month due to weak stock transactions. The average daily stock turnover last month stood at NT$71.3 billion, the lowest since September last year when turnover averaged NT$66.6 billion per day.
For the first seven months of the year, tax revenues reached NT$992.5 billion, up 2.1 percent from the same period last year, the ministry said. The figure accounts for 67.5 percent of the target set for the whole year, Lee said.
■ FPC delays cracker startup
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said it had postponed the startup of Asia's largest chemical plant because of labor and raw material shortages.
Formosa has delayed the opening of its the naphtha-processing unit, or cracker, at least six months to April, company spokesman Lin Keh-yen (林克彥) said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. The plant will produce 1.08 million tonnes a year of ethylene, used to make plastics and textiles, increasing Asian output by 3.9 percent.
Record oil prices have caused project delays and cost overruns across the energy industry as investment in fields, refineries and chemical plants stretches the supply of engineers, welders and steel pipes.
Formosa's cracker project, built on reclaimed land near Mailiao (麥寮) in Yunlin County, is part of a US$4.3 billion expansion, which includes increasing the capacity the firm's oil refinery by 20 percent to 540,000 barrel a day.
■ NT dollar rises
The New Taiwan dollar gained ground versus the US greenback yesterday, rising NT$0.039, or 0.1 percent, to close at NT$32.777 in the local foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$695 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],”
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts