Effective policing and heavy punishment are likely to have reduced illegal fuel sales by 68 percent year-on-year in the first four months of this year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday in a press release.
The ministry’s Bureau of Energy said police recorded eight arrests for illegal fuel trading in the first four months of this year, a big drop from 25 arrests for the same period last year.
The bureau said the major reason for the decline could be stepped-up police investigations in recent years as surging international crude oil prices push the government to keep tabs on the illegal trade.
Eighty-seven arrests were recorded last year, with the total amount of illegal fuel recovered reaching 221 kiloliters, of which 25 kiloliters was gasoline and 196 kiloliters was diesel.
The larger share of diesel oil indicated that illegal traders were targeting trucks rather than cars, the bureau said.
Another reason for the lower figure was the heavy punishments for fishing boat skippers who illegally sell fuel to truck drivers, the bureau said.
Apart from heavy fines, boat owners face a one-year suspension of their fishing license for a first offense; a second offense results in the revoking of the license.
With domestic oil prices set to rise, however, the bureau expects more illegal oil trading, which would jeopardize both public safety and fair competition, the bureau said.
State-owned oil company CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油), has not raised gasoline prices since last November, despite skyrocketing international oil prices, because of a price-cap put in place by the Democratic Progressive Party government.
The company is set to increase oil prices to reflect higher costs following the inauguration of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration on May 20.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS