The US market remains the biggest end market for Taiwanese businesses, although their China-bound exports have greatly jumped, a UPS International Inc executive said yesterday.
On the back of improving economic fundamentals, UPS International’s Taiwan branch saw 50 percent year-on-year growth — the biggest rise in Asia — in the nation’s demand for China and Hong Kong-bound delivery services in the first quarter, the newly appointed general manager William Ng (黃偉賢) told a media briefing.
UPS’ China-bound delivery flights, however, only enjoy a utilization rate of 60 percent, compared with 100 percent for US-bound flights, he said.
The firm’s US-bound deliveries, which account for 50 percent of its outbound delivery business, have seen “double-digit growth [year-on-year] in the first quarter of this year,” Ng said. “This is an indication that the US remains an important end market [for Taiwan].”
Ng, a Malaysian who replaced Gary Wu (吳信翰) as general manager last month, was upbeat about Taiwan’s economic recovery, which he said would get a boost after the inking of a proposed trade pact with China.
“One of our [Taiwanese] high-tech corporate clients has even seen 90 percent growth year-on-year in exports in the first quarter,” he said, adding that “we believe the nation’s exports will continue to gather steam.”
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) yesterday announced the launch of the TSMC-UTokyo Lab to promote advanced semiconductor research, education and talent development. The lab is TSMC’s first laboratory collaboration with a university outside Taiwan, the company said in a statement. The lab would leverage “the extensive knowledge, experience, and creativity” of both institutions, the company said. It is located in the Asano Section of UTokyo’s Hongo, Tokyo, campus and would be managed by UTokyo faculty, guided by directors from UTokyo and TSMC, the company said. TSMC began working with UTokyo in 2019, resulting in 21 research projects,
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS