The production value of the nation's shipbuilding industry is expected to amount to NT$52 billion (US$1.6 billion) this year, up 21 percent over the year-earlier level, tallies released on Thursday by the Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) showed.
This will mark the first time the country's shipbuilding output has topped NT$50 billion, IDB officials said, predicting that the production value will further expand to more than NT$60 billion next year.
For the first 11 months of the year, state-owned shipbuilder CSBS Corp, Taiwan (台灣中船) saw its revenue amount to NT$26.2 billion and its pre-tax net profit hit a record NT$4 billion, the officials said.
As of the end of last month, CSBC had an order backlog of NT$125.9 billion for 60 container vessels and NT$12.62 billion for 30 fast missile attack boats that will keep its Kaohsiung shipyard busy until April 2012 and its Keelung shipyard occupied until July 2011, the officials said.
CSBS has also set up a partnership with the American Bureau of Shipping to develop new Panamax-class container vessels with a capacity of 12,500 twenty-foot equivalent units, they said.
Meanwhile, the nation's largest private-owned shipbuilder -- Jong Shyn Shipbuilding Co (中信造船) -- has invested an extra NT$1.75 billion to expand its existing shipyards and build new facilities this year. The firm's annual turnover is expected to rise to NT$4 billion with the project's completion, they said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the