Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化), the nation’s only publicly traded oil refiner, expects the diesel market to improve this year as economic growth boosts demand for fuel.
This should be a “better year” for the diesel market than last year, Lin Keh-yen (林克彥), a company spokesman, said yesterday. “It’s a bull market for diesel.”
Diesel accounted for 24 percent of Formosa Petrochemical’s sales in the first nine months of last year and was the biggest single revenue source, according to a Nov. 4 company presentation to analysts.
The fuel producer rose 0.6 percent to close at NT$91.10 in Taipei trading, after declining as much as 2.8 percent.
While the outlook for the full-year has improved, the profit in Asia for turning crude oil into diesel will probably slide from the current US$18 a barrel in the coming months as fuel demand for heating drops, Lin said.
The company’s Mailiao refinery can process 540,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
Formosa Petrochemical owns three naphtha processing plants with a combined annual capacity of 2.935 million tonnes of ethylene, a raw material for plastics, chemicals and synthetic fibers.
The Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics last month revised its GDP growth forecast for Taiwan for this year to 5.03 percent from a November estimate of 4.51 percent because of the global economic recovery.
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