The nation's representative to the WTO, Lin Yi-fu (林義夫), yesterday called for Taiwanese entrepreneurs operating in the US to help drum up US support for a free trade agreement (FTA) between the two countries.
Lin made the appeal while delivering a speech on the WTO and the government's role in the Geneva-based world trade regulatory body at a board meeting of the Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce of North America in Dallas, Texas.
Lin, who arrived in Dallas on Thursday to attend the meeting from Friday to yesterday, said Taiwan was engaging in negotiations with the US about signing an FTA, which he said would benefit Taiwanese companies.
He voiced optimism that all US-based Taiwanese corporations would join forces with the government to lobby for an FTA between the two nations to be signed as soon as possible with the goal of boosting bilateral trade and economic relations.
The US is Taiwan's third-largest trade partner after China and Japan, with bilateral trade reaching US$55.02 billion last year.
The US has been reluctant to launch talks on a trade and investment framework agreement, a stepping stone toward an FTA, because it says Taiwan's intellectual property rights protection is poor. It is also unhappy about Taiwan's rice import quotas and limitations on access to Taiwan's pharmaceutical market.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
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