Bionet Corp (訊聯生物科技), a Taiwan-based cord blood banking service, said yesterday it has been granted a license by Chinese health authorities to start business operations in China.
Bionet chairman Christopher Tsai (蔡政憲) said the company is the only foreign firm among seven such services that have permission to operate in China.
Tsai said the license is expected to take Bionet one step further toward global expansion, after -gaining a foothold in the US, Indonesia and India.
Meanwhile, the Taiwanese company has signed an agreement with the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center to set up a joint venture in the southern Chinese city to provide banking services for cord blood, peripheral blood and mesenchymal stem cells.
The company said both parties are preparing to register the joint venture in Guangzhou and hope the new company will start operations in the first quarter of next year.
According to the Guangzhou Health Bureau, Bionet is the first private firm in Asia to obtain certification from the American Association of Blood Banks and its presence in Guangzhou is expected to help internationalize the city’s biotech business.
Bionet president Liu Tien-lai (劉天來) said that more than 1.2 million babies are born in Guangdong Province each year, about eight times the number in all of Taiwan, meaning there is great potential for market growth in the Chinese province.
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
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