China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), Taiwan’s largest carrier, yesterday said it is mulling creating a new budget airline with a final assessment to be finalized by the end of the year.
That will make China Airlines the first local carrier to operate a low-cost carrier (LCC).
Facing tougher competition from budget airlines globally, the carrier said it should also keep an proactive attitude toward the issue of establishing a new LCC.
“Everyone is doing it,” CAL chairman Sun Hung-hsiang (孫洪祥) told reporters after the opening of the Taipei International Travel Fair yesterday.
Sun said the company is considering various ways to form a new budget airline, either by itself or in cooperation with other partners.
In addition, establishing a new budget airline, or transforming Mandarin Airlines (華信航空) — a subsidiary of CAL focusing on domestic and cross-strait passenger routes — into a LCC, may both be options, the carrier said.
Under the current limitations set by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), the minimum annual operating revenue for a company willing to operate an international airline is set at NT$6 billion (US$203.76 million), which would be “no problem at all” for CAL, Sun said.
However, once CAL decides to enter the LCC market, it may need extensive fleet expansion to raise its total transport capacity, Sun added.
For the carrier’s business this quarter, Sun said passenger demand may remain strong on the back of momentum driven by the travel fair.
In the first nine months of the year, consolidated sales stood at NT$104.6 billion, down 1.31 percent from a year earlier, CAL statistics showed.
The firm aims to sell more than 10,000 sets of tour packages at the travel fair this year, nearly doubling the 5,000 to 6,000 sets sold at the same fair last year, Sun said.
The four-day travel fair — which opened yesterday and will run through Monday — has 1,350 booths at the Taipei World Trade Center, with 900 stands from 60 countries or areas.
The fair, organized by the Taiwan Visitors Association (TVA, 台灣觀光協會), is expected to draw a record-high 280,000 visitors this year. Last year, the event attracted a total of 260,000 visitors, with NT$1.5 billion of tour packages sold during the four-day fair.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”