Gasoline prices drop NT$0.1
Domestic gasoline prices will be lowered by NT$0.1 per liter today, while diesel prices will remain unchanged, state-owned oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday.
After the adjustment, CPC’s price for a liter of 98-octane unleaded gasoline will be NT$24.3, 95-octane unleaded gasoline will cost NT$22.8, and 92-octane unleaded gasoline NT$22.1.
Diesel will be priced at NT$19.3.
Rival Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), the nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner, said it would match CPC’s price adjustment, and that its new prices would also take effect from today.
CPC said it would not raise its prices if world crude oil prices were to increase during the Lunar New Year holiday, but if oil prices fall, consumers are likely to see downward adjustments at the gas pumps.
The next possible price decrease could be seen on Feb. 2, it added.
On Feb. 6, oil prices will revert back to market mechanisms to be reflected at the pumps the following day, CPC said.
Apple iPhone helps Chunghwa
Apple Inc’s iPhone helped Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s largest phone operator, boost subscribers and revenue during the first month the handset went on sale, a Chunghwa executive said yesterday.
Chunghwa’s total subscribers for high-speed wireless services climbed 122,000 last month, 17 percent more than the monthly average additions for the year through November, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data from the Taipei-based operator.
“Apple’s iPhone was definitely a big boost, helping us increase users,” Shih Mu-piao (石木標), vice president of Taipei-based Chunghwa, said in an interview yesterday, declining to provide iPhone subscriber numbers.
The company beat out Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) and Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信) for the right to sell the touch-screen, Internet-capable handset, which was released for pre-sale on Nov. 29.
A Lunar New Year promotion, in which customers could swap NT$3,600 (US$107) in government-issued spending vouchers for an iPhone, may help Chunghwa surpass its target of 50,000 iPhone users by the end of March, Shih said.
Average revenue per user for iPhone customers is around NT$1,600 a month, compared with the company’s overall average of NT$700, Shih said.
China Steel posts pretax loss
China Steel Corp (中鋼), the nation’s largest maker of the metal, swung to a pretax loss in the fourth quarter because of weak demand.
The mill posted a pretax loss of NT$18.3 billion (US$545 million) in the fourth quarter, the Kaohsiung-based company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday, without giving a comparison.
China Steel had a pretax profit of NT$15 billion in the three months ended December 2007, according to Bloomberg calculations based on previous stock exchange filings.
The global recession hurt demand for commodities, prompting China Steel to lower domestic prices by 23 percent in the first quarter, with some customers being given price reductions retroactively in the fourth quarter, the company said.
China Steel booked a loss of NT$11.1 billion because of the reduced value of inventories in the fourth quarter.
Full-year pretax profit totaled NT$30.3 billion, China Steel said. That was 51 percent lower than the NT$61.7 billion posted in 2007, according to a previous filing.
CPT, Samsung sign agreement
Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (CPT, 中華映管), the nation’s third-largest liquid-crystal-display (LCD) panel supplier, has signed a five-year cross-licensing agreement with Samsung Electronics Co, Chunghwa said in a stock exchange filing yesterday.
CPT said the agreement took effect on Jan. 7 and will last until Dec. 31, 2013, the statement showed.
The company said the agreement would enhance the two companies’ competitiveness and help foster the development of flat-panel technologies.
Samsung is the world’s largest LCD panel supplier.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts