Eight local petrochemical companies recently submitted applications to the Ministry of Economic Affairs to invest up to US$7 billion in a joint venture in China after the government this month removed some bans on China-bound investment, Petrochemical Industry Association of Taiwan (石化工業同業公會) chairman Jack Shieh (謝俊雄) said yesterday.
On Oct. 1, the ministry relaxed restrictions on Taiwanese petrochemical firms’ investment in China, but required them to hold at least 50 percent of shares in any Chinese joint venture.
Shieh said the eight companies plan to invest in a joint venture with China-based Sinopec Corp (中石化) in Fujian Province’s Gulei Peninsula, but the ministry’s Investment Commission yesterday said it had not yet received the applications.
The eight firms are Ho Tung Chemical Corp (和桐), Hsin Tay Petroleum Co Ltd (盛台), USI Corp (台聚), Asia Polymer Corp (亞聚), TSRC Corp (台橡), LCY Chemical Corp (榮化), Grand Pacific Petrochemical Corp (國喬) and Lien Hwa Industrial Corp (聯華氣體).
“The plan to build oil refineries and naphtha crackers in Fujian is still a rough draft and has not yet received approval from the government,” Shieh told reporters.
The portion of the shareholding among local firms has not yet been decided, Shieh said.
Formosa Plastics Group (FPG, 台塑集團) is still conducting an analysis on whether to increase petrochemical investment in China, FPG vice chairwoman Susan Wang (王瑞華) reportedly told reporters yesterday at a corporate event, as traditional naphtha crackers face challenges from the emerging shale gas industry.
The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) said in a report released yesterday that Taiwan’s petrochemical sector would see its output grow by between 3.3 and 3.9 percent this year from last year.
However, local manufacturers’ output for next year will grow by only between 1.5 and 2 percent due to intensifying competition in the global market arising from higher operating costs, the report said, saying that Chinese petrochemical firms will use locally produced raw materials to cut costs, while US firms will rely more on cheaper shale oil and gas to mass-produce ethylene and propylene products.
“The government should assist local petrochemical companies to enhance their competitiveness in the global market by reducing tariffs in the short tern,” ITRI analyst Tseng Fan-ming (曾繁銘) said.
“Taiwanese petrochemical firms also need to explore new markets, preferably Southeast Asian countries, to reduce reliance on China’s market, and produce more high value-added chemical products to increase their competitiveness,” he added.
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