Credit balance rises
As of the end of June, Taiwan’s total credit card revolving balance amounted to NT$114.26 billion (US$3.81 billion), up NT$680 million, or 0.6 percent, from the previous month’s NT$113.58 billion, data on the Financial Supervisory Commission’s Web site showed.
The increase in revolving credit in June marked the first monthly growth since October last year, according to the commission’s data.
Total credit card payments amounted to NT$206.28 billion as of June 30, an increase of NT$39.27 billion, or 23.52 percent, from NT$167.004 billion recorded in May, data showed.
Based on the commission’s latest figures, the number of active credit cards grew by 63,236, or 0.27 percent, to 23.41 million in June from the previous month.
HTC launches Desire 510
HTC Corp (宏達電) expanded its mid-tier Desire family yesterday with the Taiwan launch of the Desire 510, a model targeted at price-conscious consumers in the 4G mobile market.
HTC said in a statement that the 4.7-inch Desire 510 will be available for “a highly affordable price.” The new phone will be available in selected parts of Europe and Asia, as well as through select carriers in the US, the company said.
Acer plans updated smartband
Acer Inc (宏碁) plans to release a variant of its first smartband, designed specially for Asian markets, according to an anonymous source familiar with the matter.
The Asian version of the Liquid Leap will be equipped with more internal memory to allow for Asian language support, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, whose characters require greater storage capacity than Latin-alphabet characters, the source said. The 1-inch touchscreen smartband is scheduled to hit Taiwanese stores in October, the source said.
Notebook demand spikes
Market advisory firm GfK Group said yesterday that 2-in-1 and gaming notebook computers saw combined demand in Taiwan spike more than threefold from a year earlier in the first half of the year.
GfK’s data showed that in the first half of the year, consumers spent US$21 million on nearly 50,000 2-in-1 notebooks, reflecting a 200 percent increase in sales volume from the first half of last year.
More than 85,000 high-end notebooks were sold locally in the January-to-June period, driven mostly by gaming notebooks and devices with a GTX graphics card, according to the statistics.
Spansion imports ended
Memorychip maker Macronix International Co (旺宏電子) on Tuesday said Allied Telesis Inc has promised to stop all US imports of products containing problematic memory chips from Spansion.
Japan-based Allied Telesis is a leading provider of networking infrastructure and flexible, interoperable network solutions.
Macronix has filed patent infringement complaints against Spansion and some of its customers over questionable microcontroller units and flash memories. Allied Telesis’ move indicates that customers have started losing confidence in Spansion products, Macronix said.
Petrochemical firm sells bonds
Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) raised NT$6 billion in a bond sale on Tuesday, saying it would use the proceeds to repay loans and enhance working capital.
The refining subsidiary of Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團) said in a statement that it sold NT$2.4 billion five-year bonds with a coupon yield of 1.43 percent, NT$2.2 billion of 10-year bonds with a yield of 1.90 percent and NT$1.4 billion of 12-year bonds at a 1.99 percent interest rate.
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
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