Following the recent wage increases in China, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) is scheduled to hold an investment summit tomorrow aimed at luring more China-based Taiwanese firms to invest at home.
The ministry also hopes the one-day summit at the Taipei International Convention Center can show overseas Taiwanese businesspeople how to take advantage of the nation’s research and development.
“With the economic pact between Taiwan and China, more Taiwanese firms will increase their presence locally,” Ling Chia-yuh (凌家裕), director-general of the ministry’s investment services department, told reporters on Friday.
Some homegrown companies actually gained fame by expanding into China, but they have been there for too long and need government assistance to navigate the investment environment there, Ling said. Officials said the department had seen a surge in inquiries from overseas Taiwanese businesses asking about financing, tax rebates and land allocation, to better diversify their risks by increasing investments in Taiwan.
The rise in inquiries came after Hon Hai Group (鴻海), which operates under the “Foxconn” (富士康) brand and is the world’s biggest contract electronics parts maker, and Japanese carmaker Honda raised their Chinese workers’ pay to cope with labor disputes in the past few weeks.
Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) told shareholders on June 8 that the group planned to combat the higher wages in China by moving some production lines to Taiwan if the government could provide Hon Hai with attractive labor and other terms at proposed free-trade port areas and special economic zones.
“It is obvious that the labor cost [in China] is no longer low,” the General Chamber of Commerce (全國商業總會) said in a statement on Friday.
“Taiwanese businesses have lost their advantages in setting up factories in China ... Many companies are thinking about relocating some of their production lines back to Taiwan,” the Taipei-based business association said in the statement.
Ling said on Friday that Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corp (康師傅控股), a Taiwanese-owned company that is the biggest maker of instant noodles in China, is also mulling expanding its production lines in Taiwan and transporting goods from Taiwan to its markets in central and southern China to save costs.
Speakers at tomorrow’s summit will include government and private sector officials, such as spokespeople from optical product maker Ginko International Co (金可國際), carmaker Yulon Group (裕隆集團) and tech gadget retailer CyberMart (賽博數碼).
There will also be consultancy services available for overseas Taiwanese companies on how to apply for a primary listing on Taiwan’s bourse or a secondary listing by issuing Taiwan Depository Receipts (TDRs), the officials said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS