The government should focus on the diverse needs of foreign companies if it wants to attract more investment and commercial opportunities, British Chamber of Commerce Taipei (BCCT) Chairman Peter Crowhurst said.
“The employment environment in Taiwan is not especially unusual throughout Asia. Japan and South Korea are just as restricted, but it is often far easier to work in China, Singapore or Hong Kong,” Crowhurst said at a recent meeting of the Taiwan Britain Business Council in Taipei.
“It is no surprise to see those particular countries and territories — Singapore and Hong Kong — are more open to foreign talent and have more internationally diverse and dynamic GDP and societies,” he said. “Singapore is an excellent example of a small country that recognized relatively recently the need to distinguish itself from other cheap manufacturing hubs with the development of tourism, services and creative industries.”
The BCCT urges Taiwan to pursue diversity in its workforce now that the nation has excellent places to work, a dynamic economy and a caring community, Crowhurst said.
He added that the food and restaurant business could be one of the key economic drivers in future UK-Taiwan investment, citing the recent opening of a Taiwanese-style bubble tea shop in London that has been a big hit with both locals and tourists.
The Bubbleology tea shop, which opened on April 21, sells an average of 500 cups of bubble tea a day and up to 1,000 on weekends, with people lining up for as long as 45 minutes to give the beverage a try.
The UK’s exports to the Asia-Pacific region last year were up 25 percent from 2009, while exports to Taiwan rose 40 percent, making Taiwan one of the UK’s fastest-growing export markets not only in Asia, but the world, said the British Trade and Cultural Office (BTCO), the UK’s de facto representative office in Taiwan.
BTCO Director David Campbell said at the meeting that some British companies have chosen Taiwan as their business hub in the Asia-Pacific region and established new offices here.
Taiwanese companies are also expanding their interests in Britain, Campbell said.
HTC Corp (宏達電) is set to expand its staff in the UK after acquiring London-based digital content provider Saffron Digital Ltd for £30 million (NT$1.4 billion) to add content to its products.
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