The production value of Taiwan’s auto industry is expected to continue growing this year amid an improving global economy, a local research center forecast on Tuesday.
The output of the local auto sector including motorcycles is likely to grow by between 2.3 and 3.5 percent this year, Industrial Economics and Knowledge Research Center manager Annie Shih (石育賢) said.
“After a gloomy 2013, the auto sector is expected to perform better this year amid a warming consumption market,” Shih said at a press conference in Taipei.
The automobile sector is expected to increase by 3.7 to 4.5 percent of the year, while the motorcycle sector could grow by 2.3 to 3.5 percent, she said.
Taiwan’s auto sector output was estimated at NT$236 billion (US$7.8 billion) last year, up 1.9 percent from a year earlier, the government-funded center said.
Taiwan Transportation Vehicle Manufacturers Association (台灣區車輛工業同業公會) director Hwang Wen-fang (黃文芳) cautioned against being “just a colony industry manufacturing for other brands” and urged local branding and promotion.
Taiwan should aim at overseas markets, he said, as the auto industry “is a game of economic scale” and Taiwan’s market is too small for manufacturers to survive on alone.
Hwang suggested China, saying Taiwan can “negotiate well with China” based on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement.
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