Following the acquisition of a Chinese brewery last month, Far Eastern Textile Co (遠東紡織), the nation’s largest textile maker, plans to start selling beer in China this summer, a Chinese-language media report said yesterday.
Far Eastern Textile said it invested a total of US$12 million in Chung Bi Beer (中比啤酒), a brewery in Suzhou, which produces both self-branded beer and sells polyethylene terephthalate (PET) beer bottles, a company filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange at the end of last month said.
Prior to Far Eastern Textile’s investment in the Chinese brewery, the company had invested US$98 million in a bottle-grade PET chip plant in Suzhou last year, with an estimated production capacity of 280,000 tonnes. The company expects the plant to start mass production this quarter, the China Times reported.
With the company now having the capability to produce beer and beer bottles, Far Eastern Textile could start selling beer in China as early as this summer. However, the name of the company’s self-branded beer has yet to be decided.
TIMING
Far Eastern Textile said this year was the best time to tap into the Chinese beer market as beer consumption has been climbing and will increase during the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Market estimates showed that Chinese consume on average 35 million tonnes of beer annually.
Far Eastern Textile estimates that the company could produce up to 560 million beer bottles a year if production at its plant reached full capacity at 280,000 tonnes, the report said.
BOTTLES
Estimates show that if each beer bottle were sold for 4 yuan (US$0.57), Far Eastern Textile could generate revenues of more than NT$10 billion from selling beer bottles alone.
The global beer bottle market has an annual production volume of 100 million tonnes, equivalent to at least NT$100 billion (US$3.3 billion) in business opportunities. However, PET bottles for beer packaging only account for 2 percent of total production.
Far Eastern Textile’s new investment nevertheless has tremendous room for growth, especially amid growing advocacy for environment-friendly PET bottles, the report said.
FUTURE
Far Eastern Textile, a subsidiary of Far Eastern Group (遠東集團), was established in 1954 and was listed in 1967. Aside from the manufacturing of polyester fiber, woven fabric and clothing, the company also produces PET bottles, plastic sheets and industrial fiber.
In recent years, Far Eastern Textile has sought to transform itself into an industrial holding company and has plans to change its name, the report said, adding that the company would then divide into the textile, property development and reinvestment business sectors.
Far Eastern Textile shares rose 1.71 percent, or NT$0.9, to close at NT$53.5 on the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Friday.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to