Local textile companies created net exports of US$8.4 billion last year, accounting for about 25 percent of the nation’s total net exports of US$33.1 billion, the government said yesterday.
“Eight in every 10 yoga garments sold in the US use fabrics from Taiwan,” Bureau of Foreign Trade Chief Secretary Wang Cheng-fu (王振福) said at a press conference for this year’s Taipei Innovative Textile Application Show (TITAS, 臺北紡織展).
A total of 367 textile manufacturers from 11 countries are using 760 booths to exhibit their latest offerings at the three-day show, which begins today at the Taipei World Trade Center’s Nangang Exhibition Hall.
The exhibition features functional textiles for apparel, upholstery and industrial use. It also exhibits a variety of recycled and sustainable textiles with low carbon footprints, as well as fashion textile trends for the upcoming seasons, according to the Taiwan Textile Federation, the event’s organizer.
Taiwan’s textile companies exported products worth US$11.7 billion last year, with 65 percent of the value coming from fabrics, He Kun-lin (何昆麟), vice president of Far Eastern New Century Corp (遠東新世紀), which makes textile products, said at the press conference.
In the first nine months of the year, exports of the nation’s textile and apparel industry reached US$8.69 billion, down 0.1 percent from the same period last year, according to the Taiwan Textile Federation’s statistics.
Imports for the same period increased 4 percent year-on-year to US$2.51 billion, the statistics showed.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
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
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
purpose: Tesla’s CEO sought to meet senior Chinese officials to discuss the rollout of its ‘full self-driving’ software in China and approval to transfer data they had collected Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk arrived in Beijing yesterday on an unannounced visit, where he is expected to meet senior officials to discuss the rollout of "full self-driving" (FSD) software and permission to transfer data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Chinese state media reported that he met Premier Li Qiang (李強) in Beijing, during which Li told Musk that Tesla's development in China could be regarded as a successful example of US-China economic and trade cooperation. Musk confirmed his meeting with the premier yesterday with a post on social media platform X. "Honored to meet with Premier Li