The nation's automobile sales figures continued to plunge for the first nine months of the year, with last month seeing a drastic decline of more than 40 percent, latest statistics show.
Car sales during the period from January to last month totaled 286,238 units, a 30 percent drop from the corresponding period last year, according to figures released by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
Last month alone sales fell by 43 percent from last year to only 25,005 units, the statistics showed.
The car market was adversely affected this year by two "ghost months," starting on July 25, which caused consumers to put a brake on major spending.
Auto sales during ghost month normally decline by around 30 percent, Steven Yang (楊湘泉), spokesman of Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), the nation's top automaker, said in July.
But last month's sales dip was more severe compared to August -- the first ghost month -- which saw a dip of 37 percent to 17,513 units.
Though oil prices have showed signs of declining, Ford Lio Ho Motor Co (福特六和), the nation's fourth-biggest automaker, didn't expect lower gasoline prices to have much of an effect on the falling figures for the year as a whole.
"The aftermath of consumers' card debt will probably drag on for two years, and we assume the market will only start to pick up in the second half of next year," said Steven Chang (
Consumer spending in Taiwan this year has been sluggish due to the abuse of credit and cash cards, with financial institutions tightening control of loans, which affects car sales.
Ford Lio Ho -- which experienced the biggest sale decline, 44 percent, among all automakers during the first nine months of the year -- projected that total sales this year will reach just 350,000 units, its lowest figure in five years.
To revive lackluster sales, vendors are pumping big bucks into car advertising and promotional activities, but this will not necessarily lift brand recognition among consumers, said Paul Huang (黃志鵬), associate director at researcher ACNielsen Taiwan.
China Motor spent the most on advertising in the first half of the year, forking out NT$226 million (US$6.8 million), while Ford Lio Ho was not far behind with NT$206 million, according to the results of an online poll by ACNielsen released last Wednesday.
Toyota was ranked the No. 1 local car brand by the 1,800 respondents, even though its distributor Hotai Motor only spent NT$156 million on advertising in the first half, according to company figures.
Honda Taiwan Co, which allocated NT$67 million to promote its lineup, has its Honda brand ranked the second highest among local consumers.
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
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
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],”
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