A container ship owned and operated by Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) is ready to depart for China’s northern port city of Tianjin on Monday when direct cross-strait shipping links are launched, a corporate source said yesterday.
An Evergreen full-container vessel departing from Kaohsiung Harbor at 10am will be the first Taiwanese commercial ship to sail directly from Kaohsiung to a port in China in more than five decades.
The ship, with a capacity of 1,168 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units), is scheduled to sail directly from Kaohsiung to Tianjin’s New Port before heading to the northern ports of Dalian and Qingdao on its way home, an Evergreen spokesman said. One TEU represents the cargo capacity of a standard shipping container 20 feet (6.1m) long and 8 feet (2.4m) wide.
Four container ships owned and operated by Taiwan’s Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運), Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp (YM, 陽明海運), Taiwan Navigation Co (台灣航業) and China’s Huarong Marine Co (華榮海運) are also scheduled to depart on Monday from the northern port of Keelung.
One of the four vessels with a capacity of 1,500 TEUs is scheduled to depart from Keelung for Kaohsiung Harbor before heading to Shanghai. From Shanghai it will visit other Chinese ports — Dalian, Taicang, Qingdao and Lianyungang — before returning to Keelung, a Yang Ming official said.
A 20,000-tonne bulk carrier owned and operated by Da Sheng Marine Co (達盛海運) is scheduled to depart from Taichung Harbor for China’s Fuzhou Port, where it will load gravel for transport back to Taiwan.
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