Taiwanese businesses have called for a law on industrial espionage, especially by China, as growing ties have made it easier for Chinese firms to steal secrets, officials and media said yesterday.
Lee Kun-yao (李焜耀), chairman of the flat-panel maker AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), made the appeal while meeting President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with a group of high-tech entrepreneurs on Wednesday.
The proposal was prompted by a spate of cases involving the theft of business secrets from Taiwan’s high-tech companies, Lee said, without providing details.
“Taiwan really needs such a law now as it faces mounting competition from mainland China,” another official from AU Optronics told reporters.
The idea seemed to be supported by several firms, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電).
“Such a law will better help Taiwan’s industry,” TSMC spokeswoman Elizabeth Sun (孫又文) said.
Currently, suspects are indicted on charges such as breach of trust and embezzlement, but Lee said the punishment for such crimes was not enough.
The Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association, which groups the nation’s major electronics firms, also called for a law as early as possible.
TSMC filed a lawsuit against Chinese rival Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) in the US in 2003, alleging SMIC improperly obtained its trade secrets and infringed patents. In 2005, SMIC agreed to pay TSMC US$175 million to settle the case after the Taiwan chipmaker filed new evidence of corporate espionage with a US court.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS