Vietnam’s economic growth may accelerate this year, enabling the Southeast Asian country to attract investment from overseas as the global economy rebounds from the worst recession in more than six decades.
The country will grow between 6.5 percent and 7 percent this year, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Ho Chi Minh City. The economy expanded at a 5.3 percent pace last year.
“Vietnam has become an attractive and safe destination for international investors,” Dung said. “Foreign investment capital has constantly risen over the years in Vietnam and plays an important role in the economic success of the country.”
Economic growth may gain further momentum to between 7 percent and 8 percent from next year to 2020, he said.
The global recovery from last year’s recession has boosted Asian exports and lifted economic growth from Thailand to Malaysia.
“After the strongest crisis since the Second World War, Asia has been surprisingly very stable and is bouncing back very fast,” Frans Muller, a member of the management board of Germany’s Metro AG, the country’s largest retailer, told the same conference.
Earlier this month, Dung asked the central bank to implement measures to reduce rates and help the country achieve economic growth of 6.5 percent this year.
Hanoi has tried to bring down borrowing costs that climbed to as high as 20 percent this year after a link was severed between the central bank’s benchmark and commercial banks’ interest rates.
Meanwhile, Hanoi plans to sell more foreign-currency denominated bonds, Deputy Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem said in an interview yesterday in Ho Chi Minh.
“Our bond-sale plan depends on which projects we need to invest in, their effectiveness, and the level of risk involved,” he said.
Vietnam sold its first foreign currency bond in 2005, raising US$750 million in an offering in which demand exceeded supply by more than six times. In January, the Vietnamese government sold US$1 billion of 10-year debt.
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
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six