Easier DVD patent system
The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday approved the formation of a patent alliance submitted by the world’s major DVD makers which aims to charge royalties at reasonable prices and not to hamper market competition.
LG Electronics Inc, Pioneer Corp, Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV and Sony Corp will form the DVD patent alliance through a new company, One-Red LLC, with each of the four companies holding a 25 percent stake, a statement issued by the commission said.
Approval is expected to make it easier for local DVD makers to license patents from these companies as they will only have to negotiate with One-Red LLC, rather than separately with all four.
Wind farm subsidies given
Three companies, including the nation’s sole electricity supplier Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), have qualified to receive a government subsidy to build model offshore wind farms, an energy official said on Friday.
Tseng Tseng-tsai (曾增材), a deputy section chief at the Bureau of Energy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said Taipower, Fuhai Wind Power (福海風力), and Marine Wind Power (海洋風力) had promised to build four to six wind-power generation units by 2015 and complete their offshore wind farms before 2020.
The windfarms’ combined electricity generation capacity will reach 300 megawatts.
The electricity generated will be sold to Taipower at NT$5.5626 per kilowatt hours over the next 20 years. The price was fixed by a panel set up by the government for this purpose exclusively.
Upward trend in electronics
Taiwan’s electronics industry will continue its upward trend in the first quarter of the year amid improving indicators, Barclays PLC said on Friday.
The nation’s industrial production index stood at 128.57 points last month, up 2.39 percent from the same period a year earlier, marking the sixth consecutive rise, government statistics released on Wednesday showed.
Leading indicators, such as export orders and the purchasing managers’ index, suggest that the trend of improvement in the manufacturing sector will continue in the first three months of this year, the bank said in a statement.
As HTC Corp (宏達電) only launched its new series models in November last year, it is likely that another boost in production will follow in the months to come, said Leong Wai Ho (梁偉豪), a Singapore-based economist at Barclays.
TransAsia Air gets new Airbus
Taiwanese carrier TransAsia Airways Corp (復興航空) took delivery of its second Airbus A330-300 on Saturday, in another step forward in its ongoing efforts to expand its presence in Asia.
TransAsia said the new aircraft will first be deployed on the cross-strait route during the Lunar New Year holiday, when demand for air travel rises sharply as people travel home for family gatherings.
TransAsia plans to obtain another six A321-200s, 12 A321-neos, and 12 ATR-600s by 2022.
Not enough investment in IT
Companies should increase their information technology (IT) budgets amid an increasingly digital world, Gartner Inc said in a statement released on Friday.
A survey conducted by Gartner of 2,000 chief information officers around the world shows that enterprises have only realized 43 percent of the business potential of their technology and that their IT budgets have been flat to negative ever since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 and 2002.
For this year, chief information officers’ IT budgets are projected to fall slightly, with a weighted global average decline of 0.5 percent, the survey results showed.
Over the past 18 months, digital technologies — including mobile, big data and cloud — have reached a tipping point among business executives, Gartner said.
Asustek shows off new tablets
Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) on Friday unveiled its new tablet computers, following the success of the Nexus 7 tablet series it launched with Google Inc last year.
Among the new offerings was the VivoTab Smart ME400, a 10.1-inch tablet that runs Microsoft Corp’s Windows 8 operating system and weighs 580g.
Another new tablet was the 7-inch MeMO Pad ME172, which runs Google’s Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system and weighs 360g.
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