Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) and China Telecom Corp (中國電信) yesterday announced plans to jointly build a submarine cable between Kinmen and Xiamen.
Construction of the submarine cable is estimated to cost less than 100 million yuan, or NT$476 million, with the two telecom operators sharing the cost, company executives said yesterday on the sidelines of a two-day meeting on Cross-Strait Telecommunications Cooperation and Exchange in Taipei.
The submarine cable project is still subject to approval by Taiwanese and Chinese authorities.
Leng Rongquan (冷榮泉), chief engineer of China Telecom, said the company was still in talks with Taiwan’s largest telecommunications operator about the project.
He said that construction of the cable would be beneficial to the telecommunications industry on both sides of the Strait, as it would increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Chunghwa Telecom’s chairman and chief executive officer Lu Shyue-ching (呂學錦) said the construction of the submarine cable will begin once it receives the green light from Taiwan’s Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
“If development of the telecommunications industry across the Taiwan Strait could help reduce costs, we would lower prices to reflect the cost reductions,” Lu said.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Hwang Jung-chiou (黃重球) estimated that the demand for third-generation (3G) mobile phones in China would reach 150 million units within the next year or two.
Hwang said China’s 3G mobile communication market offers 1 trillion yuan in business opportunities, with about 60 percent going to mobile phones. If Taiwanese manufacturers could get hold of about one-tenth of the pie, it would be worth around 60 billion yuan.
Mobile phone manufacturers and chip design companies in Taiwan will be the biggest beneficiaries, he said.
Separately, China Mobile Communications Corp (中國移動) yesterday voiced its confidence that the Taiwanese government would permit it to invest in Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信).
China Mobile on April 29 announced a strategic alliance with Far EasTone and plans to buy a 12 percent stake in the Taiwanese firm.
China Mobile vice president Liu Aili (劉愛力) said that while the company has plans to expand its stake in the future, it would not get involved in Far EasTone’s daily operations and would never become the firm’s major shareholder.
“I believe there is no vital difference between holding 10 percent and 12 percent. I don’t believe that the [Taiwanese] government will allow us to hold a 10 percent stake in Far EasTone, but say no to holding 12 percent,” Liu said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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