TAX
Luxury tax boosts coffers
The Ministry of Finance said yesterday a total of NT$1.45 billion (US$48.25 million) in revenue has been submitted to national coffers either as overdue payments or fines as of the end of last month after its inspection of the collection of the luxury tax. The ministry found 2,618 problematic cases of property transactions that should have been subject to the special sales tax as of the end of last month. The tax was introduced in June 2011. A total of 1,352 cases generated NT$732.28 million in overdue payments, with the other 1,266 cases fines that totaled NT$722.22 million, the ministry’s data showed.
ELECTRONICS
Firms get iWatch orders
Two leading Taiwanese electronics companies that assemble products for Apple Inc have received orders to make the highly anticipated “iWatch,” an analyst and reports said yesterday. “Apple is likely to introduce the iWatch in 2014. From our channel checks, Inventec (英業達) is the major assembly source for iWatch, with about 60 percent of the order allocation,” CIMB Securities analyst Wanli Wang (王萬里) said in a report. CIMB forecast a total of 63.4 million iWatch shipments in the year after its launch at an average price of about US$199. The Chinese-language Apple Daily said Quanta Computer (廣達) was handed 40 percent of the order allocation, citing unnamed sources.
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