■SHIPPING
Bone fragments found
Malaysian authorities yesterday found bone fragments from two bodies on board a stricken Taiwanese oil tanker that was involved in a collision in the Malacca Strait earlier this week. The MT Formosaproduct Brick (立善輪) caught fire and was seriously damaged on Tuesday after a collision with a Greek-managed bulk carrier in the narrow shipping lane. Nine crew members remain unaccounted for. Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency Director First Admiral Tan Kok Kwee said although search and rescue efforts were still ongoing for the missing crew members, authorities were not holding out much hope.
■ELECTRONICS
Firm builds a thinner fan
A Kaohsiung-based company has earned a silver award at the 2009 National Invention and Creation contest for developing the world’s thinnest fan to cool down electronic gadgets. The fan, with a thickness of only 3mm, is nearly half as thick as the 5mm regular mini fans, and is one 1mm thinner than the thinnest fan of 4mm produced by a Japanese company. Founded in 1980, Sunon Group (建準電機) has patented its invention, which can be installed in small spaces in electronic products and propel strong air currents through its blades.
■CHINA
Twelve million jobs needed
China can create 12 million jobs this year, about half the number needed should the economy hit an 8 percent growth target, a government official said in an online statement on Friday. The shortfall of 12 million jobs will be larger than last year, according to Yin Weimin (尹蔚民), minister of Human Resources and Social Security. He didn’t provide a comparative number. New university graduates, workers from the countryside and low-income city residents have the biggest difficulty in landing jobs, Yin said. Opportunities at export-oriented companies have plunged because of the international financial crisis, he said.
■AUTOMOBILES
Honda to sell electric cars
Japan’s Honda Motor Co plans to sell electric vehicles in the US early next decade to meet growing demand there for environmentally friendly cars, a newspaper reported yesterday. Honda, which has so far focused on hybrid vehicles, is now developing at least one prototype of an electric vehicle to be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in October, the Nikkei Shimbun business daily said. The move comes after its domestic rivals — Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co — announced similar plans.
■AUTOMOBILES
VW assembly bid hits hurdle
Negotiations to assemble Volkswagen cars in Malaysia have ground to a halt, the Edge newspaper reported, citing unidentified sources. Discussions between Germany-based Volkswagen AG and DRB-Hicom Bhd, a Malaysian auto and construction group, ran into difficulty about three weeks ago following interference from certain unnamed government-linked bodies, the newspaper quoted unidentified officials as saying.
■INTERNET
Facebook supports tweets
Facebook on Friday said it is letting celebrities, businesses and others with public pages at the social-networking hotspot instantly turn status updates into tweets at Twitter. In coming days, Facebook will release software enabling managers of public pages to route updates automatically to the micro-blogging service.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”
HIGH-TECH: As leading-edge process technologies become more complicated, only a handful of players are able to provide design services, the company’s CEO said Artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯) yesterday said that revenue would grow significantly again in 2026 after adding a major AI chip customer, reversing moderation amid a product transition next year. The Taipei-based application-specific IC (ASIC) designer reiterated its strong revenue growth forecast for this year and 2026 after its stock plummeted about 23 percent to NT$3,145 from a peak of NT$4,085 on March 6 amid growing competition. Alchip said it has built strong partnerships with cloud service providers (CSP), denying that it had lost orders to smaller competitors such as Faraday Technology Corp (智原). Faraday said it has secured