The Cabinet on Monday approved a plan to increase the stake Chinese investors can hold in some local firms to 50 percent, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. The plan is scheduled to come into effect by the end of this month
The move represents the third round of opening the nation’s markets to Chinese investors and it allows cross-strait investments in 161 types of Taiwanese firms — 115 manufacturing sectors, 23 service businesses and 23 infrastructure construction projects.
“The plans will continue to deepen cross-strait industrial cooperation and expand the positive effects of Chinese investment on Taiwan,” Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Hwang Jung-chiou (黃重球) told a media briefing.
However, despite the latest relaxation, Chinese investors are still not allowed to have managerial control or become major shareholders in several key manufacturing sectors, including in flat panels, semiconductors, LEDs and solar batteries, he said.
Taipei has been opening the local market to Chinese investments for almost three years, with 247 types of businesses addressed by the first two rounds.
As of January, Chinese investors had invested US$272 million in 217 cases, the ministry said.
Since the third round will allow Chinese capital to be invested in 97 percent of the categories in the Taiwanese manufacturing sector, the government will eventually regulate investments by just naming the sectors excluded from investment, said Fan Liang-tung (范良棟), executive secretary of the ministry’s Investment Commission.
However, the approach would only be used once more businesses in the service and infrastructure sectors have been opened to Chinese investors, Fan added.
About 51 percent of businesses in both the service and infrastructure sectors will be open to Chinese capital after the latest round of openings, the ministry said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts