Gas, diesel prices rise
Domestic gasoline and diesel prices will rise by NT$1.1 and NT$1.3 per liter respectively today to reflect rising international crude oil prices, the state-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), the nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner, announced yesterday.
After the adjustment, CPC’s price for a liter of 98-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$32.3, 95-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$30.8, 92-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$30.1 and diesel will be NT$27.7.
The hike in oil prices today put an end to three consecutive weeks of price cuts.
FTTH rate reaches No. 4
Taiwan’s nationwide penetration rate of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services has moved up a notch to fourth in the world, following South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, according to a survey by the FTTH Council, an international non-profit organization.
According to the Taiwan-based Institute for Information Industry, user numbers for FTTH services in Taiwan increased from 200,000 households in 2006 to 550,000 last year. That number increased to 650,000 in the first quarter of this year.
Institute officials estimate that households connected to FTTH networks will number 1 million by the end of the year, while by 2011 the service will extend to 2.5 million households.
CAL offers Manila service
In a show of commitment to southern Taiwanese clients, China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), announced yesterday that it would provide a daily service between Kaohsiung and Manila from Oct. 1.
Flight CI 637 will depart at 9:05am from Kaohsiung and arrive in Manila at 10:45am. The return flight, CI 638, will leave at 11:45am and arrive in Kaohsiung at 1:25pm.
An expected increase in business from cross-strait travel did not materialize for CAL. It is therefore focusing on profitable, short-haul routes.
Overseas tax in 2010
The Ministry of Finance said on Thursday that the Cabinet had approved a ministry proposal to impose a tax on overseas earnings in 2010.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the ministry said the new charge will come into effect in 2010, instead of next year as first proposed, because current tax breaks outlined in the Basic Income Tax Code (所得基本稅額條例) do not end until the end of next year.
With the Cabinet working on an overhaul of the nation’s taxation system, the ministry said the one-year delay would facilitate the success of the transition.
The Cabinet is mulling reforms such as lower corporate, inheritance and gift taxes to help attract investors.
NT dollar down again
The New Taiwan dollar declined for a third day after the nation’s central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates and US lawmakers held up a plan to buy US$700 billion in troubled assets from leading financial companies.
The NT dollar fell NT$0.047, or 0.2 percent, to close at NT$32.045 against the US dollar, according to Taipei Forex Inc. It climbed 0.4 percent this week, ending nine weeks of losses.
“In the near term, we could still see some weakness in the Taiwan dollar, mainly because risk aversion remains at very elevated levels,” said Maya Pinto, an economist at IDEAglobal in Singapore.
“But in the medium to longer term, once the US financial crisis blows over, among the regional currencies we’d expect the Taiwan dollar to outperform again,” he said.
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],”
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
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