Tainan mulls solar initiative
Tainan County, home to the nation’s biggest solar cell maker, aims to build the biggest community powered by sunlight to help cut pollution.
The county government has invested NT$3 billion (US$95 million) preparing infrastructure for 107 hectares of land for the plan, aiming to attract developers to build 4,000 houses with solar panels within five years, said Chan Yi-chin (詹益欽), the solar project director in Tainan county.
Taiwan is joining countries including the US and Spain to tap renewable sources of energy to help cut carbon emissions. The government in Taipei aims to fit solar panels on 100,000 homes as a new pricing structure for renewable energy helps ensure profits for builders, said Wang Yunn-ming (王運銘), deputy director-general of the Bureau of Energy.
“We hope to use these pollution-cutting panels in Taiwan,” Chan said in a telephone interview yesterday.
A project of 60 townhouses on the site, each to be fitted with 3.45 kilowatts of solar panels, is expected to be completed by the end of the year, Chan said.
A unit will probably cost between NT$7 million and NT$8 million, he said.
Motech Industries Inc (茂迪), Taiwan’s biggest solar cell maker, has plants in Tainan.
To spur renewable energy use, Taiwan’s government set minimum wholesale prices in December for electricity generated by solar panels and wind turbines at levels higher than for power from fossil fuels.
FIH shares surge on sale news
Formosa International Hotels Corp (FIH, 晶華國際酒店) surged to the highest in three months in Taipei trading yesterday after Rezidor Hotel Group AB and Carlson, a closely held hospitality and travel company, said on Friday they had agreed to sell the Regent luxury hotel business to Formosa.
Formosa gained 5.2 percent to NT$389 shortly after the TAIEX opened — the highest since Jan. 21 — before closing higher at NT$395.50 each.
Powerchip’s Huang cleared
Powerchip Semiconductor Corp (力晶), the nation’s largest memory-chip maker, said chairman Frank Huang (黃崇仁) was cleared by the Hsinchu District Court on a charge of insider trading, the Hsinchu-based company said in an exchange filing yesterday.
In a separate news, the local semiconductor industry is expected to see 24.8 percent year-on-year growth to NT$1.58 trillion in output this year, Topology Research Institute (拓墣產業研究所) forecast yesterday.
Growth driver for this year comes from a pickup of demand for smartphones, notebooks and tablet computers, triggered by Apple’s iPad, the market researcher said in a statement yesterday.
Dollar drops on investor moves
The New Taiwan dollar declined, retreating from a 19-month high yesterday, as investors favored safer bets than emerging-market assets after Goldman Sachs Group Inc was sued for fraud.
“This is a one-day move on the [NT] dollar’s strength against Asia,” said Tang Yi-li, head of the currency division at Shinkong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) in Taipei. “The market’s move comes from the Goldman Sachs issue. The US dollar still has pressure to go lower against the Taiwan dollar.”
The local dollar weakened 0.3 percent to NT$31.492 against its US counterpart at the 4pm close, Taipei Forex Inc said. The currency touched NT$31.339 on Thursday, the strongest level since August 2008.
The currency pared its gain this year to 1.7 percent as funds based abroad sold US$112 million more Taiwanese stocks than they sold yesterday, trimming this year’s net purchases to US$3.2 billion.
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],”
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
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