Far Eastern Group (遠東集團) chairman Douglas Hsu (徐旭東) said yesterday that many foreign businesses have expressed interest in joining hands with their counterparts in Taiwan to make inroads into China after a planned cross-strait trade pact is signed.
“How can Taiwan see a lackluster economy after an economic cooperation framework agreement [ECFA] is signed?” Hsu asked at the sidelines of a shareholders’ meeting of Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信).
For example, Hsu said, a mineral entrepreneur in Canada recently talked with him about the possibility of forming joint ventures in China to take advantage of the conditions that would be created by an ECFA.
“I need to think hard to figure out which businesses are likely to experience poor business in the second half of this year because of an ECFA,” said Hsu, whose group’s business cover the areas of textiles, cement, petrochemicals, department stores, transport and telecommunications.
Saying that Far EasTone has a plan to lead Taiwan’s service industries in exploring the Chinese market, Hsu said he would not elaborate on the details until an ECFA is signed.
Taiwanese and Chinese negotiators completed their third formal round of ECFA talks in Beijing on Sunday, paving the way for the proposed pact’s signing later this month or early next month, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said on Monday.
In April last year, Far EasTone said it would sell some of its shares to China Mobile Ltd (中國移動), the largest telecommunications company in China. The government has not approved the deal.
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained