TELECOMS
HTC confirms lay offs
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp (宏達電) confirmed on Saturday media reports that its division in the US has laid off some employees. Foreign media reports said that HTC America has let go up to 20 percent of its workforce. The company’s US arm originally had about 150 employees. New Taipei City (新北市)-headquartered HTC defended the layoffs as a decisive action to streamline management, but it did not reveal how many employees had been affected. Media reports said that about 30 employees and contract workers had been laid off. HTC said in a statement that the reduction in workforce was a “decisive action ... to streamline and optimize our organization and improve efficiency after several years of aggressive growth.”
FOOD
No hike in cooking oil price
The Taiwan Vegetable Oil Manufacturers Association said on Saturday that their members would not increase the price of cooking oil in the short term and would absorb the rise in costs resulting from higher electric rates, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The ministry’s remarks came after local media reported that cooking oil suppliers were planning to increase prices by between 3 percent and 5 percent next month to reflect the price hikes by state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電). The ministry said that Taipower’s proposed 10.3 percent increase in electricity rates for industrial users would raise the industry’s manufacturing costs by only 0.164 percent. Global prices of soybean, the main raw material used in the manufacture of cooking oil, have also remained stable this year.
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
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