Holiday bazaar planned
The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) is planning to stage a Lunar New Year bazaar for the first time at the Taipei World Trade Center next year, according to organizers.
“In order to boost the shopping spree before the Lunar New Year, we’d like to provide an alternative venue for the public,” said TAITRA’s Kelly Wang (王蕙琳), who is in charge of the event.
The event is scheduled to take place from Jan. 16 to 22 next year, with 120 businesses expected to occupy 300 booths, organizers said.
Indonesia making trade easier
Indonesia has adopted a series of incentives in its trade policies to create favorable conditions for Taiwanese businesses to invest there, an Indonesian official said on Friday.
The policies introduced to encourage investment include a 10-year preferential tax treatment offer and tax subsidies for 129 industries, Indonesian Minister of Trade Gita Wirjawan said during a press briefing in Jakarta.
Late last year, Taiwan and Indonesia signed a memorandum of understanding on a plan to jointly develop Morotai, one of Indonesia’s northernmost islands.
Stop double taxation in Canada
A tax agreement that Taiwan hopes to sign with Canada aims to avoid double taxation and will not cause a negative impact on Taiwanese expatriates there, an official said on Friday.
The main purpose of the agreement is to encourage mutual investment in both countries and avoid double taxation, Representative to Cananda Liu Chih-kung (劉志攻) said during an interview on a Chinese-language radio show in Toronto.
Avoidance of double taxation is part of the groundwork for Taiwan to create favorable conditions to gain entry to regional economic blocs such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership –– a proposed free-trade group made up of Pacific-Rim countries, he said.
The agreement will take effect on the first day of the year after the two sides have signed the agreement and notified each other that the required procedures have been completed.
Show for smart living tech
The Taipei Telecom Applications Show, which will run from Thursday to Sunday at the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall, will highlight smart living technologies and the fourth-generation (4G) super-fast mobile broadband technology, according to organizers.
The event will act as an exchange platform for local telecom carriers, application providers and noted mobile device brands, according to the Taipei Computer Association (TCA, 台北市電腦公會). A music competition in which participants must use mobile devices to play and compose music instead of using real instruments is also planned, it said.
More than 150,000 people are expected to visit the exhibition.
Lunar New Year benefits hotels
Hoteliers in Hualien County reported more than 90 percent occupancy rates during the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday, leaving nearly no empty rooms during one of the busiest hotel seasons.
The hotel industry had been worried that disruption caused by days of heavy rain in late December last year on the Suhua Highway might cause problems for business.
However, the highway was reopened before the holiday and hoteliers saw 90 percent occupancy rates, with no empty rooms available on the third and fourth days of the holiday, the Tourist Hotel Association in Hualien County said.
Chinese tourists accounted for more than half the occupancy rate, but it was domestic travelers who contributed most to the rate, the association added.
Trading hours extended
Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd, the world’s largest exchange company by market value, said it received regulatory approval to start after-hours futures trading and will begin the service on April 8.
Hang Seng Index and H-shares Index futures will be available for trading from 5pm to 11pm from the date, in addition to regular hours, the bourse said in a statement on Thursday. Gold futures will also be considered for inclusion at a later stage, it added.
The extended hours will help attract more European and US investors to the territory’s derivatives market and it will also allow market participants to hedge and adjust positions when news breaks in European and US hours, according to the statement.
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
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
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],”
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