Citi sells off last Fubon stake
Citigroup has divested its remaining holdings in Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), the nation's fourth-biggest financial group said yesterday.
Fubon president Victor Kung (龔天行) said that since the two groups called off their strategic alliance in June 2004, Citigroup has gradually offloaded its stockholding in Fubon.
On July 12, the US bank sold 118 million common shares to foreign institutional investors, followed by its final move last Thursday to sell more than 99 million global depositary shares, reducing its holding in the Taiwanese rival to zero.
Acer chief pans Windows Vista
The head of Taiwan-based PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, hit out at Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, calling it a big disappointment.
"The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista," the head of the world's fourth-biggest PC maker told the Financial Times Deutschland in its online edition yesterday.
Never before had a new version of Windows done so little to boost PC sales.
"And that's not going to change in the second half of this year," Lanci said.
"I really don't think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista," he said.
While the industry had waited years for Vista, the software was not really ready when it was launched to great pomp at the start of this year, Lanci said.
"Stability is certainly a problem," he said.
ASE, NXP team up in China
Global IC testing and packaging giant Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE, 日月光半導體) and NXP Semiconductors of the Netherlands will invest an initial US$36 million in a joint venture in China, the Taiwanese company said yesterday.
ASE will take a 60 percent stake in the project in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, while NXP will hold the remaining 40 percent, it said.
The joint venture, expected to begin operations later this year, is to provide packaging and testing services, the spokesman said.
"The US$36 million will be an initial investment. We are expecting to put more funds into the project but the amount will depend on market conditions," he said.
HTC joining top brands list
High Tech Computer Corp (HTC, 宏達電), the world's largest maker of handsets using Windows operating system, is joining the nation's list of top 20 brands.
HTC, which recently ventured into the own-brand business with the launch of "HTC Touch,"a touchscreen phone, is one of the newcomers in the roster of top local brands that offer the most value.
The top companies will be formally announced on Thursday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (外貿協會).
Other names in the top 20 list include Acer Inc, Advantech Co (研華), Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦), BenQ Corp (明基), D-Link Corp (友訊科技), Depo Auto Parts Industrial Co (帝寶工業) and Giant Manufacturing Co (巨大機械)
Biotech begins on Thursday
Bio Taiwan, an exhibition showcasing the latest biotech innovations and products, will start its four-day run on Thursday at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall I.
More than 300 exhibitors from the public and private sectors occupying more than 700 booths will display medical equipment, health food, skincare products, including an expensive golden facial mask priced at NT$8,000 each, and other biotech applications, organizer Taiwan Bio Industry Organization (中華民國生物產業發展協會) said at a press conference yesterday.
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