This year’s Computex Taipei is expected to help participating companies seal business deals worth more than US$20 billion — the figure achieved at last year’s fair, the show organizer said yesterday.
“We expect Computex to create more business dollars this year, as a number of new products will be showcased at the fair,” Moses Yen (顏木松), executive director of the exhibition department of Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會), told a press conference.
Computex is the world’s second-largest IT tradeshow after Germany’s CeBIT. At last year’s event, nearly US$700 million in deals were sealed during one-on-one procurement meetings, and the whole trade fair helped conclude trade deals totaling US$20 billion, Yen said.
Fifty more companies and 205 more booths have been reserved for this year’s event, which will be held from June 1 to June 5 at the Taipei World Trade Center. The number of companies participating is 1,750 with 4,700 booths, TAITRA said.
It is expected to attract a record-breaking 35,000-plus international buyers, it said.
Into its 30th year, Computex will hold more than 100 conferences and forums. E-reading will be discussed at the “E-book Industry Trend and Design Forum,” while the “3D Technology and Design Forum” will focus on the technology’s latest developments. Cloud computing will also be featured in a forum.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy