Amtran shifts to China
Local flat-panel TV maker Amtran Technology Co Ltd (瑞軒) will gradually allocate its local capacity to a Chinese operation to save costs, company spokesman Scottie Chiu (邱裕平) said by telephone yesterday.
Amtran has yet to come up with a timetable for the closure of its local plant in Huko (湖口), Hsinchu, Chiu said.
Amtran sells liquid-crystal-display (LCD) TV sets under the Vizio brand in North America. Vizio was the No. 3 brand in North America with a 12.5 percent share of the market in the first quarter.
Chiu declined to reveal how many employees work at the factory, but said that most were foreign labor and worked on short-term contracts. The company has encouraged Taiwanese employees to transfer to the company’s other divisions or to file for prefential packages to leave the firm.
Investment at home increases
Taiwanese businesses that relocated overseas are showing renewed interest in investing at home, committing to 166 investment projects in Taiwan since September 2006, figures released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed yesterday.
The projects, including 65 recorded during the first six months of this year, are estimated to be worth a total of NT$19.5 billion (US$640.7 million), the figures showed.
Thirty-nine projects have been completed and 62 are underway, with the number of workers hired totaling 5,890. The remaining 65 projects are under evaluation, it said.
Of the total investment projects, 115 — worth a total of NT$16.7 billion — were made by China-based Taiwanese companies. Most of the projects were in the machinery, computer, electronics and optical product manufacturing sectors.
Meanwhile, 13 investments were made or planned by Taiwanese businesses in Southeast Asia, 33 by Taiwanese businesses in North America and five from other regions.
TAITRA on the offensive
The government will create a taskforce to help overseas buyers buy products made by Taiwanese manufacturers, Wang Chih-kang (王志剛), the new chairman of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會), said yesterday.
Wang made the remarks during his inauguration ceremony yesterday.
The board of the government agency approved Wang’s nomination as successor to Hsu Chih-jen (�?�) on Tuesday.
Wang said TAITRA would help local companies with Chinese operations sell their products in China rather than export them to other markets to cope with rising labor cost and falling tax refunds in China.
Yahoo goes interactive
Yahoo will allow developers everywhere to create applications throughout the Yahoo properties and make every element of the Yahoo experience more interactive through its Yahoo Open Strategy.
Yahoo chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh said at a briefing in Taipei yesterday that rather than having 25 independent application programming interfaces, a single consistent programming model would be used for all Yahoo properties, which he said would unlock the true power of Yahoo.
Balogh said Yahoo would hold its annual event Open Hack Day in Taiwan for the first time in September, during which local developers will have 24 hours to create an application and present it.
NT drops against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar dropped NT$0.012 to NT$30.372 against the US dollar on turnover of US$755 million.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
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