Auto sales in Taiwan for German luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz are projected to go down by 18 percent this year from a year earlier, better than a projected 45 percent decline for the overall auto market here, a company official said yesterday
“The luxury car market segment is shrinking this year, but less than the general market,” Wolfram Geisler, president and chief executive officer of Mercedes-Benz Taiwan Ltd (台灣賓士), told reporters yesterday.
By the end of last month, only 121,000 domestic and imported passenger cars had been sold on the Taiwan auto market so far this year. Geisler said he expected the Taiwan market to consume at most 180,000 new vehicles this year, which he said was “the lowest ever” compared with 275,000 units sold last year, and 463,000 units in 2005.
In the first nine months of the year, 35,000 imported cars were sold in Taiwan, down 30 percent from a year earlier, while the luxury car segment slipped 27 percent to 27,000 units.
“It shows no sign of recovery yet at this moment,” Geisler said, adding that he didn’t think anything positive will happen this year.
Aside from high oil prices that have forced people to refrain from buying cars, other factors such as the recent US banking crisis will also affect auto sales, which he said “are not in Taiwan’s control anymore.”
Geisler made the remark as Mercedes-Benz launched its updated B-Class edition and the C-Class Estate five-door station wagon in Taipei yesterday, with prices starting from NT$1.65 million (US$508,000) and NT$2.09 million respectively.
The company introduced two models of C-Class Estate, C200 Kompressor Estate and C280 Estate, with a limited offering of 20 units each.
Geisler said 24 orders had been received, and he expected the C-Class Estate to be more popular next year for buyers who desire spaciousness with less fuel consumption.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by