Formosa Plastics plans plant
Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), one of Taiwan’s largest industrial conglomerates, said yesterday it plans a stainless steel plant in Vietnam, with local media citing a budget of over US$3 billion.
The plant will be part of a steel mill complex that the conglomerate intends to build in the central province of Ha Tinh, a group official said.
The official said a timetable of the construction of the stainless steel plant had not been finalized, and declined to disclose further details.
The Taipei-based Economic Daily News reported yesterday the plant will cost the group NT$100 billion (US$3.1 billion).
The newspaper said the planned stainless steel plant is expected to roll out 2 million tonnes a year.
HK firms hit by big tax bills
Taiwan’s tax authorities have ordered four Hong Kong clothes brands to pay millions of US dollars in fines for alleged tax evasion, officials said yesterday.
The National Tax Bureau has fined HangTen, Giordano, Bossini and BaLeNo around NT$530 million (US$17 million) collectively for alleged tax evasion over a four-year period ending in 2002.
HangTen was fined NT$293 million alone.
The four firms, which have hundreds of stores in Taiwan, rejected the charges and previously sought to present their case in the court system, but they lost the legal battle, a HangTen official said.
HTC phone scoops prize
HTC Hero smartphone was announced last week as the best mobile handset of the year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, beating Samsung Star, Samsung Omnia HD, Nokia N97 mini and BlackBerry Bold 9700, the company said.
That was the first time that HTC Corp (宏達電), the leading maker of smartphones running on both Android and Windows Mobile platforms, made it into the shortlist for the category.
HTC Hero is a 3.2-inch touch screen model that runs on the Android operating system.
TSMC purchases equipment
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), the world’s largest custom-chip maker, bought NT$696 million (US$21.6 million) of equipment from Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co, the Hsinchu-based company said in an exchange filing yesterday.
Meanwhile, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (日月光半導體), the world’s largest chip packaging and testing company, said in an exchange filing it bought NT$1.08 billion of equipment from Kulicke and Soffa Global Holding Corp.
“The purchase shows that they have a lot of orders for the rest of the year and investors are optimistic about this company,” said Rubens Lai, a trader at Taiwan International Securities Corp (金鼎證券).
S Korea set for record offerings
South Korea will “easily” absorb initial share offerings that will probably surge to a record this year amid abundant liquidity and optimism shares will hold their value, Daewoo Securities Co said.
Companies may raise as much as 12 trillion won (US$10.4 billion) from initial public offerings this year, said Gabriel Jung, 47, head of the investment banking group at Daewoo Securities, the No. 1 IPO underwriter in South Korea over the past five years. That would be more than threefold the 3.4 trillion won raised last year.
“There’s ample liquidity, confidence in the stock market has recovered quickly from the global credit crunch and there are signals for positive corporate earnings,” Jung said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last