The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) said it had scheduled a three-day procurement fair at Computex this year, allowing local small and medium-sized enterprises to conduct trade talks with potential buyers on a one-on-one basis.
TAITRA, which helped organize the five-day Computex to be held from tomorrow to Saturday, said it expected to see more than 4,000 procurement talks launched between local exhibitors and foreign buyers this year, creating US$20 billion in business.
At last year’s Computex, TAITRA arranged a two-day procurement fair to assist local firms in capturing business opportunities that generated US$200 million in business.
Based on registration tallies, Computex this year will gather international firms with annual revenues exceeding US$1 billion, such as Japan’s office equipment maker Ricoh Co, Poland’s information technology products distributor ABC Data and Germany’s Siemens AG, TAITRA said.
The event will also see other leading consumer electronics makers and distributors with annual revenues exceeding US$100 million, including firms from Germany, France, Canada, Spain, the US, eastern Europe and the Middle East, TAITRA said.
Meanwhile, a Chinese trade group led by Association of Economy and Trade Across Taiwan Straits (AETATS) chairman Li Shuilin (李水林) was scheduled to arrive in Taiwan yesterday at the invitation of TAITRA.
The trade mission is expected to sign procurement contracts worth several billion US dollars with local IT and home appliances manufacturers, TAITRA said.
TAITRA said it approached AETATS to organize three trade missions this year for total procurements worth between US$8 billion and US$10 billion.
The first group will consist of 46 Chinese companies
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