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.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last