Taiwanese investment in the Philippines this year more than doubled to top US$113 million, despite the global economic downturn, a report by the Taipei-based Manila Economic & Cultural Office (MECO) said.
Ancku Taichung Corp topped the list with a US$60 million electric arc furnace project being built in Batangas province, followed by a US$40 million investment plan by Teco Electric and Machinery Co (東元電機), which produces UMID cards — multi-purpose identification cards used in the Philippines’ social service system, MECO reported.
The two companies’ combined investment has far surpassed the figure of all investment from Taiwan for last year, which totaled US$45.7 million, MECO said.
Dita Angara-Mathay, MECO’s director of commercial affairs, said Ancku was planning to invest another US$100 million to build a blast furnace in the Philippines.
To attract greater investment from Taiwan, four delegations from the Philippines sponsored investment seminars and took part in trade fairs in Taiwan last year, in search of more trade and investment opportunities.
Mathay said Taiwanese investment would again double next year, with more than 50 percent going to the power sector.
Other Taiwanese firms that have invested in the Philippines this year include China Bond International Services for iron-ore mining in Aparri, worth US$5 million, as well as a US$2 million coal mining project by Shyi Chien Co in Sorsogon Province and a US$2 million plywood manufacturing plant by Tian Yuan Co in Butuan province.
Mathay said that a Taiwanese footwear group was scheduled to visit the Philippines in the first half of next year to study the feasibility of setting up an operation in Bataan province.
The Taiwanese footwear maker is considering Bataan because of the availability of large tracts of land and its proximity to the Subic and Clark free port zones, Mathay said, adding that there was still a big possibility that a footwear cluster would be set up by Taiwan businesspeople in the Philippines, depending on the willingness of the Philippine government to provide subsidies for land leases.
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS