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.
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
RSS