A trade group yesterday urged the government to pay more attention to the domestic service sector, which accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s industry, but drives only 20 percent of its GDP growth, suggesting there is ample room for improvement.
“The government has long channeled resources to the manufacturing sector, offering it various incentives and tax credits to help it upgrade and expand, which has indirectly contributed to stagnant wages,” former Uni-President Group (統一集團) chief executive Jason Lin (林蒼生) told a monthly meeting of the trade group Third Wednesday Club, of which he is vice president.
Companies in the service sector have a good chance of building niche markets at home and abroad, if the government would only lend its support instead of just focusing on big-cap companies, he said.
Lin, who steered Uni-President for nearly half a century, said most coffee shops in South Korea are distinctive and different from each other — unlike those in Taiwan, which tend to look the same.
While scale matters, differentiation can help a company distinguish itself from the competition and carve out a market for itself, Lin said.
The government has contributed to the nation’s heavy dependence on exports, which has made the economy vulnerable to external blows, he said.
The government is aware of the need for reform, but has not taken any bold steps to shake up its industrial policy, while countries like China and India are taking domestic demand-oriented business seriously, Lin said.
The service sector employs more workers and can expand beyond the nation’s borders, just as the makers of consumer electronic devices have, Lin said.
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