Legislators yesterday gave preliminary approval to a draft bill that offers commodity tax cuts for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)-powered hybrid cars to help the country reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The bill proposed lowering the commodity tax on LPG hybrid vehicles by NT$25,000 (US$861.8) for a five-year period. However, to encourage more people to buy the hybrids, some lawmakers suggested increasing tax cuts.
Automobile companies pay a commodity tax rate of between 25 percent and 30 percent of the factory value of a car, which they then pass on to buyers, Ministry of Finance data showed.
“The bill, if passed, may push local automobile firms to develop or to import more environment-friendly models, while encouraging consumers to buy less polluting vehicles,” Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) said during a question-and-answer session at the legislature.
Passage of the bill would help the nation reduce energy consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and follows the Cabinet’s strategy of encouraging energy-saving electric vehicles, Lee said.
The tax breaks for LPG hybrid car distributors may create a demand for 5,200 LPG hybrid cars in total in the next five years, which would reduce tax income by an estimated NT$136.5 million, the ministry said.
The ministry expects the legislative second and third readings of the bill to go smoothly.
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