Southern Taiwan Science Park (南部科學園區) yesterday said its revenues suffered a 55 percent decrease in the first two months from the same period last year, but park officials added that things appeared to be improving.
In January, companies in the park generated a total revenue of NT$21.2 billion (US$626 million) and the figure increased by about 10 percent to NT$23.4 billion last month, the park administration’s director-general, Chen Chun-wei (陳俊偉), said in Tainan yesterday.
“We spoke to some business representatives last December, but their faces looked very grim; they looked slightly better in January and last month they were beginning to look a bit more optimistic,” Chen said.
“Currently, some firms are looking at orders for May,” the director-general said.
Two industries — solar panels and biotechnology — however, have weathered the economic downturn well, Chen said.
“We are currently operating at 80 percent of our production capacity and have not implemented unpaid leave so far,” said Huang Yu-chou (黃裕洲), an associate manager at Motech Industries Inc (茂迪), the largest solar panel manufacturer in the Tainan park.
As the economic downturn has mainly been caused by a drop in market demand and not supply, which is unprecedented when considering previous economic crises, National Science Council Deputy Minister Chen Li-chun (陳力俊) said there was no way of predicting what would happen in the future.
However, even in firms that do have unpaid leave, the situation seemed to be changing for the better, Chen Li-chun said.
In the Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區), where about 78,000 people are currently taking unpaid leave, an estimated 20,000 workers will return to their posts on April 1 because United Microelectronics Corp (聯電) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) have promised to end the practice, he said.
In the Southern Taiwan Science Park, the number of employees on unpaid leave will be reduced to 6,000 next month, down from 16,000 this month, 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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained