The number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan is likely to surge with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) re-election, a tourism insider said yesterday.
Roget Hsu (許高慶), secretary-general of Travel Agent Association of ROC, Taiwan (中華民國旅行商業同業公會全國聯合會), said the industry was estimating an influx of 2 million Chinese tourists this year, as the ties between Taiwan and China would continue to improve during Ma’s second term.
The number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan last year was about 1.79 million, Tourism Bureau statistics show.
With the new round of talks on cross-strait tourism exchanges expected to begin shortly after the Lunar New Year holiday, Hsu said, more travel incentives were expected.
The free independent travel (FIT) program, which was launched in June last year, allows up to 500 Chinese from Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen to visit Taiwan per day.
Although the initial results of the program were not satisfactory, with fewer than 20 FITs arriving per day in the first two months, Hsu said the effects were likely to become clearer later this year.
His view was supported by the National Immigration Agency’s statistics last month, which said the number of FITs had jumped significantly in the latter half of last year.
According to its data, the number of FITs arriving in October was 6,679 and 6,729 in November.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
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
RSS