Ford Lio Ho Motor Co (福特六和) yesterday said it expects the local car market to grow between 5 percent and 6 percent next year from this year as consumer confidence improves.
“With more and more new products introduced in Taiwan, we believe next year will be a very good year,” marketing and sales director Anderson Liu (劉繼升) said.
Fubon Securities Co (富邦證券) is more cautious about the market for next year, forecasting auto sales would grow 2.7 percent from this year. The brokerage predicted car sales would rise 1.1 percent this year from 365,871 units last year, according to a report issued yesterday.
Liu said the SUV segment would grow the fastest, as SUVs offer more safety features for passengers and a higher sitting position for drivers.
The segment accounts for 15 percent of the total car market, up from between 12 percent and 13 percent of the market three years ago, he said after the launch ceremony of Ford’s 1.5-liter EcoSport SUV.
Ford Lio Ho, the fifth-largest car distributor in the nation, acquired 6.4 percent of the market by selling 19,804 cars from January through Nov. 10, up 32.8 percent from a year ago, industry data showed. Taiwan’s auto sales increased 0.7 percent year-on-year to 309,191 units from January through Nov. 10, the data showed.
Liu said the company aims to become one of the nation’s top three automakers within three years by introducing new models and upgrading its customer services.
“We are still experiencing a shortage of our main car components, which need to be imported, otherwise our sales would have been higher,” Ford Lio Ho manager Shawn Huang (黃南瑄) said.
Commenting on Mazda Motor Corp’s move to end its cooperation with Ford Distribution Taiwan (品爵汽車), which distributes Mazda cars in Taiwan in the coming year, Huang said that although Mazda plans to set up a new subsidiary in Taiwan, Ford Lio Ho is still likely to be responsible for manufacturing Mazda cars domestically.
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