New Industrial Development Bureau (IDB, 工業局) Director-General Shen Jung-chin (沈榮津) yesterday vowed to reshape and upgrade Taiwan’s industry and create more job opportunities.
Shen, who was formerly the head of the Export Processing Zone Administration, succeeds Woody Duh (杜紫軍) at a time when the gloomy international economic situation, including the eurozone debt crisis and China’s import contraction, has impacted Taiwanese companies.
Export orders — an indicator of exports over the next three months — declined 3.52 percent year-on-year to US$36.09 billion in April and the figures for last month are expected to continue declining year-on-year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on May 21.
“How to enhance all the industries in the country and ramp up the engines of manufacturing and service is the crucial role that the Industrial Development Bureau has to play,” Shen said.
The bureau would push for more integration of the manufacturing and services industries, as well as “push for more technology-enabled service industry and more internationalization of the service industry, and differentiating traditional industries,” Shen said.
“The country needs to take advantage of its advanced ICT [information and communication technology] industry to upgrade its industrial structure, and promote the transformation of regional industry,” he 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
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