The Shin Kong Tower (
It was the 10th consecutive time that the Taipei City Land Department has declared the tower the most expensive property in the city.
The world's tallest building, Taipei 101, came in second at NT$2.97 million per ping. The skyscraper showed the biggest increase in value, 8.4 percent on average, from NT$2.74 million per ping last year.
The KMall near the Taipei Railway Station, Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store's (
"[Improvements to the] public transportation system, urban planning and urban renewal had the greatest affect on land prices," department Commissioner Huang Rong-feng (黃榮峰) said.
Huang said the Taipei 101 property would continue to increase in value as a result of the rapid development of the Xinyi District and the completion of the Xinyi MRT line in 2012. However, the completion of the Taoyuan Airport MRT line the same year and various urban development projects would see to it that the Shin Kong Tower remained competitive, he said.
On average, land prices increased 6.69 percent this year, with the Neihu District (
While Neihu and Nangang were boosted by the Neihu Technology Park (內湖科學園區) and Nangang Software Park (南港軟體園區), Huang said land values in Datong, which was once considered an elderly, poor community, increased sharply as a result of urban renewal projects.
Huang said his department collected information from real estate agencies and land acquisition companies to calculate average land prices, but did not attempt to influence the market.
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