Progress made in enhancing Taiwan’s bilateral ties with Singapore and New Zealand in the form of economic cooperation agreements would help the country secure a seat in the emerging Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade bloc, Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said yesterday.
Yang called an informal press conference to highlight the significance of the announcement made in Taiwan and New Zealand on Tuesday that the two nations had started a feasibility study on a bilateral economic cooperation agreement.
New Zealand was one of several countries that had expressed an interest in signing economic pacts with Taiwan when the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) was negotiated, Yang said.
Yang said that New Zealand wishes to become the first country to sign a free-trade agreement with Taiwan after the ECFA was signed, which suggests that “New Zealand places great emphasis on the issue.”
Taiwan and Singapore began formal talks under the title “Agreement between Singapore and the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu on Economic Partnership” earlier this year after they completed a four-month study on the feasibility of such a deal.
In addition to Singapore and New Zealand, which were both among the four countries that conceived and launched the TPP in 2006 along with Chile and Brunei, Taiwan is also working with India and Indonesia on feasibility studies for similar economic agreements, Yang said, adding that the Philippines would be the next country to follow suit.
With the economic cooperation mechanisms with Singapore and New Zealand under negotiation, Taiwan would not only deepen bilateral relationships with its major trading partners other than China, but also significantly boost its chances of participating in regional economic integration, such as the TPP, Yang said.
Meanwhile, Yang said he expected a preliminary timetable for the signing of an open-skies agreement with Japan to liberalize bilateral commercial aviation exchanges to be set sometime in the middle of next month.
Japan called off the previously scheduled signing of the aviation pact on Sept. 27 at the last minute without offering specific reasons, but the two countries proceeded with the signing of an investment agreement as scheduled.
Yang said that Japan did not cancel the signing because of pressure from Beijing. The investment agreement would not have been signed if China had been a factor, he said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
NO SHORTCUTS: Asked about Elon Musk’s Terafab initiative, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said it takes two to three years to build a fab and another one to two to ramp it up Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday raised its revenue growth forecast for this year to above 30 percent, up from the 25 percent it estimated three months earlier, citing extremely robust artificial intelligence (AI)-related chip demand. “Our customers and customers’ customers, who are mainly cloud service providers, continue to send us very positive signals and outlook,” TSMC chairman and CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said at an earnings conference. The company also hiked its capital expenditure for this year toward the higher end of its forecast, or US$56 billion, as it aims to step up advanced chip capacity expansions, such as
The founder of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group (恆大集團) has pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and bribery, a court said yesterday, the latest blow for what was once the country’s leading developer. Evergrande’s rise was propelled by decades of rapid urbanization and rising living standards, but in 2020, its access to credit dramatically narrowed when the government introduced curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation. The company defaulted in 2021 after struggling to repay creditors. Founder Xu Jiayin (許家印), 67, known as Hui Ka Yan in Cantonese, was reportedly held by police in 2023, with Evergrande saying he had been subjected to
RSS