A Taiwanese businessman’s US$160 million investment in a cement factory in Vietnam may go down the drain because of a policy flip-flop by a local government.
Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬), Taiwan’s representative to Vietnam, has written letters to Vietnamese officials, from Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Thi Doan on down, urging them to solve the dispute or face the prospect of Taiwanese businesses losing interest in investing in the country.
Chen Liang-chuan (陳兩傳), the founder of Taipei-based Lucky Cement Corp (幸福水泥), poured US$160 million into He Duong Cement Company in Ninh Binh in 2008 after being awarded the right by the local government to mine a 72-hectare limestone field for 49 years. The project was approved by Nguyen and related ministries.
However, just as the plant’s two new production lines with a total capacity of 4 million tonnes a year were set to begin trial runs, the local Ninh Binh government rejected He Duong’s request to begin exploiting the field, because it had designated the field part of the Trang An Scenic Landscape Complex before applying to UNESCO in September to have the complex recognized as a world heritage site.
Sources at Lucky Cement said Vietnamese authorities are trying to find another limestone mine to replace He Duong’s original field, but they worried that a new mine location would entail additional transportation costs.
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