Taiwan could become a new star in the cruise tour market once restrictions on foreign ships traveling across the Taiwan Strait are eased later this year, an operator said yesterday.
The removal of such restrictions will allow cruise operators to obtain permission for several trips with each application, which will encourage more ships to stop in Taiwan, said Royal Caribbean Cruises, a major cruise ship company based in the US.
The company said Taiwan’s strategic location in maritime transportation lanes in Asia makes it possible for Keelung Port to become a major cruise ship hub like Hong Kong, Singapore and Tianjin, China.
Royal Caribbean plans to put a 140,000-tonne cruise ship into service on its Asia routes next month, introducing the biggest cruise liner operating in the region.
Starting in August, the massive ship will sail routes between Keelung and Shanghai, as well as to destinations in Japan and South Korea, Royal Caribbean said.
Taiwan and China have agreed to allow foreign cruise ships to operate between the two sides of the Strait without having to apply for permission before each trip, according to the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
The agreement, negotiated by the shipping associations of Taiwan and China late last year, is expected to be officially signed during bilateral talks in China in the first half of this year, the ministry said yesterday.
Because very few cruise ships are registered in China or Taiwan, cruise operators have not benefited from a 2008 cross-strait pact that allows direct services across the Strait by ships registered on either side.
As a result, cruise operators have had to obtain approval before each trip between Taiwan and China. Keelung Port, which handles the heaviest cruise ship traffic among all of Taiwan’s ports, recorded more than 461,000 visits by cruise ship passengers last year, a 2.6 percent increase from the previous year.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained