During the second day of their eight-day inspection tour of Taiwan, representatives of China Eastern Airlines Corp (中國東方航空), one of the three major Chinese state-owned aviation enterprise groups, entered talks yesterday with China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), the nation’s largest airline, over possible plans to cooperate on direct weekend charter flights after July 4.
Issues such as tour ground handling agents, aircraft engineering maintenance, a mileage exchange program and the Shanghai-based Chinese airline’s plan to set up local offices were among the items discussed, a CAL executive said yesterday.
“Since this is the first round of talks [between the two airlines], we looked at broad issues,” CAL spokesman Bruce Chen (陳鵬宇) said by telephone yesterday, adding that the details of possible cooperation would be made public after both companies had finalized their terms.
“As a leading local airline, CAL will fly wherever there are customers,” Chen said.
Aside from the visit by China Eastern Airlines, representatives of China Southern Airlines Co (中國南方航空) and Air China Ltd (中國國際航空), the biggest and second-largest airlines in China, also arrived in Taiwan yesterday and were expected to hold talks with CAL and EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) today.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily quoted CAL chairman and president Ringo Chao (趙國帥) yesterday as saying on Saturday that as CAL and China Eastern Airlines already had experience working together on festival charter flights — with CAL in charge of 60 percent to 70 percent of ground handling agents — the two airlines would extend talks about weekend charter flights based on past cooperation.
China Eastern Airlines is also considering setting up offices in Taipei and Kaohsiung to serve their China-bound Taiwanese passengers, Chao said.
CAL already has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Guangzhou and has no plan to open new offices in China, Chen said.
The report also said that China Eastern Airlines representatives, who arrived in Taiwan on Saturday, had also entered discussion with EVA Airways over similar cooperation matters, including ground handling agents and interline traffic agreements, after paying a visit to EVA Airways’ flight kitchens, aviation and training centers.
No concrete terms of cooperation were reached between the two airlines, a company executive said yesterday.
“Any cooperation [between the two airlines] will require long-term discussions. EVA Airways gave [China Eastern Airline] detailed briefings yesterday [Saturday],” EVA Airways spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維) said by telephone yesterday.
Both CAL and EVA Airways said they were considering providing flights to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. However, the distribution of 18 flights per week would not be determined until after the Civil Aeronautics Administration negotiates the matter with local airlines today.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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