Volkswagen AG plans to build and sell 10,000 electric cars in China from 2014 to 2018 as rivals add more fuel-efficient vehicles in the world’s biggest automarket.
The carmaker will produce an electric model at local ventures with Saic Motor Corp and FAW Group Corp as early as 2013 and add a battery-powered model specifically designed for the nation in 2018, Karl-Thomas Neumann, president of Volkswagen Group China, said at a conference in Shenzhen, China.
Volkswagen, the first overseas carmaker to enter the Chinese market three decades ago, joins Nissan Motor Co and Daimler AG in planning electric vehicles in the nation. While local demand for electric cars and hybrids trails other markets, China is offering buyers of plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars subsidies of as much as 60,000 yuan (US$9,000) to help cut pollution and reduce oil dependency.
“There is a very strong argument that electric cars are the right move for China, although there are still many challenges,” Neumann said yesterday. “China is making huge investments in renewable energy.”
The challenges include lessening the country’s reliance on electricity produced by coal-fired power stations and high battery costs, which make production of electric cars not feasible at the moment, Neumann said.
The German carmaker will also introduce the Touareg hybrid sport-utility vehicle locally this year and begin field tests of electric vehicles in China, it said.
Shares in Wolfsburg, Germany-based VW rose 0.9 percent to 97.70 euros (US$137.2) in Frankfurt trading on Friday. The stock has risen 28 percent this year.
Nissan, which plans to make as many as 500,000 electric vehicles a year globally by 2012, will begin tests of its Leaf electric car in Wuhan, China, next year, Hideki Kimata, senior general manager of the Japanese automaker’s Chinese joint venture with Dongfeng Motor Co, said in September.Daimler and Shenzhen-based BYD Co will be ready to introduce the electric car as early as 2012.
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
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts