Taiwan Ratings Corp (中華信評) yesterday said the credit ratings for the four core members of the industrial conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團) would not be immediately affected by the regulatory closure of several plants at the group’s Mailiao (麥寮) petrochemical complex in Yunlin County.
According to the ratings agency, the group has sufficiently diversified its business, allowing it to largely absorb the impact of the closure for a safety inspection following fires on May 12 and May 18.
The Yunlin County Government on Friday ordered Formosa Plastics Corp (FPC, 台塑), the group’s flagship company, to shut down a 12-hectare vinyl chloride (VCM) plant today and asked another group member, Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠), to close its 50 hectare Haifeng (海豐) factory compound today over safety concerns.
The closure of six plants — one run by Formosa Plastics and five by Nan Ya Plastics — beginning today will result in daily losses of NT$34.4 million (US$1.2 million), the group said on Monday.
Meanwhile, Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s (FPCC, 台塑石化) first petrochemical and olefins plant at the complex remains shut because of disruptions to raw material pipelines. The halt to production is expected to cost the company NT$13.8 million a day, spokesman Lin Keh-yen (林克彥) said yesterday in a statement.
Taiwan Ratings maintained its assessment of the four core units — FPC, Nan Ya, FPCC and Formosa Chemicals & Fibre Corp (台灣化纖) — at twAA- for long-term debt and twA-1+ for short-term credit, with a “stable” outlook.
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