Taiwan tech firms lead Asia
Technology firms dominated as Taiwan led China in a list of the best 200 Asian companies with annual revenues of under US$1 billion, Forbes Asia business magazine said yesterday.
Taiwan had 41 small and medium sized companies named as winners against China's 23, the publication said in a statement unveiling this year's "Best Under A Billion" ranking.
Hong Kong tied with economic powerhouse Japan with 22 companies each in the Forbes Asia list.
South Korea had 21 companies on the list, trailed by Singapore with 20, India 17, Australia 12, Malaysia nine, Thailand five, New Zealand four and Pakistan two. The Philippines and Sri Lanka had one each.
Nearly all 41 Taiwanese companies on the list are from the information technology sector, Forbes Asia said.
Eight out of 10 companies on the overall list are making their debut this year.
Region's salaries should rise
Salaries in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to keep rising next year, with India topping the hikes, a human resources consultancy report said yesterday.
Companies are likely to remain confident about business prospects and growth, the Hay Group compensation report said.
India ranked first with base salaries expected to rise 13.1 percent, followed by China with 6.2 percent, Indonesia 5.6 percent, the Philippines 5.2 percent and Thailand 4.7 percent.
Blue-collar employees in China are for the first time in three years expected to receive "almost as much increase as their white-collar counterparts" as a result of fierce market competition for skilled workers, the report said.
Singapore and South Korea shared sixth place, each with pay rises of 3.8 percent.
Vietnam followed with 3.4 percent, Malaysia 3.3 percent, Taiwan 3.1 percent, Australia 2.6 percent and New Zealand 1.7 percent, the report said.
China's after-tax tax
China will next month launch a new plan to tax state enterprises to cool the pace of investment activity and boost the government's coffers, state press said yesterday.
The government will start to take 10 percent of after-tax profits earned by the oil, coal, power, chemicals, telecommunications and tobacco industries, a report by Caijing magazine said yesterday.
Other state enterprises will hand over 5 percent of their after-tax profits. Scientific research institutions and military enterprises will be exempt from the plan for three years, it said.
The plan, which has reportedly been under debate for some time, will mark the first time in a decade that state enterprises have been obliged to pay after-tax profits to the government.
The government will jump-start the plan next month by collecting 17 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) from last year's profits of 169 state-run firms.
Oil `basket' price at new high
OPEC's "basket" price of crude oil, based on production in 12 countries, rose to a record US$75.61 a barrel on Wednesday, the cartel said yesterday.
"The OPEC daily basket price stood at US$75.61 a barrel Wednesday ... compared with US$74.92 the previous day," OPEC said in a statement.
Oil prices have also soared to new highs on international markets and were approaching US$82 a barrel in early electronic trading yesterday.
Analysts predict that prices will remain high, with markets concerned that supply may be insufficient to meet winter demand.
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