AUTOMAKERS
VW eyes Taiwan branch
Volkswagen AG, Europe’s largest automaker, will set up a branch in Taiwan next year, as a first step to increase its presence here and in Asia, a company executive said on Thursday. “We aim to set up the national sales company on Jan. 1, 2015,” Volkswagen AG executive vice president Weiming Soh (蘇偉銘) said in a video conference. The company will be set up no later than April next year, he said.
E-COMMERCE
Newegg sells Colorful items
US online computer products retailers Newegg.com Inc yesterday said it would start selling PC components for China’s Colorful Group (七彩虹集團) next month as part of the two companies’ global business expansion efforts. Newegg chief marketing officer Soren Mil said Colorful Group’s products will be listed on its Web site and available for customers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada at the initial stage. Newegg has more than 25 million registered members and sells up to 10.5 million units of PC-related hardware products via its e-commerce site.
TECHNOLOGY
Largan posts record sales
Smartphone camera lens supplier Largan Precision Co (大立光) on Thursday said that it posted NT$3.39 billion in consolidated sales for last month, up 6 percent from the previous month and 73 percent from a year earlier. It was the second consecutive month that Largan reported record-high monthly sales.
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