Investment targets on track
The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said investments from the private sector totaled NT$995.6 billion (US$32.99 billion) in the first 10 months of this year, 90.51 percent of its full-year target of NT$1.1 trillion.
New foreign investment hit US$8.85 billion in the January-to-October period, 98.36 percent of the ministry target of US$9 billion this year.
The ministry said it attracted NT$14.28 billion of investment from both domestic and foreign firms in the booming electric vehicle sector and related components during the first 10 months.
That amount already surpasses the ministry’s full-year target of NT$12 billion, it said.
Elpida sues Nanya Technology
Elpida Memory Inc said it has filed a patent lawsuit against Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) with the Taiwan Intellectual Property Court and the US International Trade Commission.
The Japanese chipmaker said in a statement yesterday that Nanya had violated its dynamic random access memory (DRAM) patents.
In September, Tokyo-based Elpida filed a complaint against Nanya Technology and its US unit in the Northern District Court of California, accusing the chipmaker of illegally using four of its patented technologies relating to DRAM manufacturing.
ITC delays S3 patent ruling
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has delayed until Monday its final ruling on a complaint filed by HTC Corp (宏達電) subsidiary S3 Graphics Co against Apple Inc.
The ITC was originally scheduled to release a final ruling on the case on Tuesday, but in a notice posted on its Web site, the agency said it had decided to extend the target date for the completion of the investigation “on certain electronic devices with image processing systems, components thereof and associated software that infringe patents asserted by S3.”
S3 accused Apple in May last year of violating four patents owned by the company.
The ITC handed down a preliminary ruling in the case on July 26, in which it found that Apple’s Mac OS X system had infringed on two of S3’s texture compression patents, but that the iPhone and iPad had not.
HP to launch its first ultrabook
Hewlett-Packard Co, which last month abandoned a proposal to spin off its PC unit, plans to introduce its first lightweight ultrabook laptop to compete with Apple Inc’s MacBook Air.
The HP Folio laptop has a 13.3-inch screen and weighs 1.5kg. The PC will go on sale on Dec. 7 priced at US$900, according to a statement.
It is Hewlett-Packard’s first entry into the ultrabook category of laptops created by chipmaker Intel Corp. The Folio features a metal case, 4 gigabytes of memory, a solid-state hard drive and Intel’s Core i5 chip, HP said in the statement.
The company said the Folio’s battery can run as long as nine hours without recharging.
Euro woes weaken NT dollar
The New Taiwan dollar fell against its US counterpart yesterday, declining NT$0.020 to close at NT$30.230, a reflection of the weakness of the currencies in the Asia-Pacific region because of concerns over rising borrowing costs in debt-ridden Italy, dealers said.
The fears over the debt problems in the eurozone escalated after 10-year Italian government bond yields jumped above 7 percent again overnight, which prompted traders to forecast that the European country might need a bailout, dealers said.
Turnover totaled US$674 billion during the trading session.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
READY TO HELP: Should TSMC require assistance, the government would fully cooperate in helping to speed up the establishment of the Chiayi plant, an official said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said its investment plans in Taiwan are “unchanged” amid speculation that the chipmaker might have suspended construction work on its second chip packaging plant in Chiayi County and plans to move equipment arranged for the plant to the US. The Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported earlier yesterday that TSMC had halted the construction of the chip packaging plant, which was scheduled to be completed next year and begin mass production in 2028. TSMC did not directly address whether construction of the plant had halted, but said its investment plans in Taiwan remain “unchanged.” The chipmaker started
MORTGAGE WORRIES: About 34% of respondents to a survey said they would approach multiple lenders to pay for a home, while 29.2% said they would ask family for help New housing projects in Taiwan’s six special municipalities, as well as Hsinchu city and county, are projected to total NT$710.65 billion (US$23.61 billion) in the upcoming fall sales season, a record 30 percent decrease from a year earlier, as tighter mortgage rules prompt developers to pull back, property listing platform 591.com (591新建案) said yesterday. The number of projects has also fallen to 312, a more than 20 percent decrease year-on-year, underscoring weakening sentiment and momentum amid lingering policy and financing headwinds. New Taipei City and Taoyuan bucked the downturn in project value, while Taipei, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung
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