The General Chamber of Commerce (商業總會) in a white paper yesterday urged the government to give top priority to stabilizing ranking officials and keeping policies consistent, as frequent changes make it more difficult to draw up business development plans.
“Policy consistency should be at the top of the government’s agenda no matter who is in power, or the private sector will have to pay heavy costs to stay legally compliant,” the chamber’s annual paper said.
Scores of ministers have stepped down under the current administration, for moral, health, career or other reasons, leaving the industry directionless in planning business strategies, as succeeding officials pursued different policies, the paper said.
Ministers of finance, labor affairs, economic affairs, health and welfare, the financial supervisory commission, national defense and the interior all quit due to pressure amid controversy, instead of Cabinet reshuffles.
“The government has shown a tendency to avoid making major policies for fear of controversy, and has therefore abandoned policies it has touted as important and necessary for the nation,” the chamber’s chairman Lai Cheng-i (賴正鎰) said, citing the service trade agreement with China.
However, policymakers have adopted roughly made policies such as capital gains taxes on stock investments to pander to minority groups, only to virtually axe the levy later, Lai said.
Furthermore, government officials by and large fail to demonstrate prowess in terms of leadership, management and damage control, as seen in recurring food safety scandals, the paper said.
While food makers themselves are to blame, the government is slow and lax in reining in the fallout from these scandals, Lai said.
“Repeated tainted cooking oil scandals involving large firms have seriously harmed Taiwan’s reputation as ‘the paradise of delicacies,’” Lai said, adding that the government has tried hard to boost tourism, in a bid to cut the nation’s dependence on electronics exports.
Lai warned against government plans to hike taxes on capital gains from property transactions, saying the government promised not to use real-price registration data for tax purposes, but would be doing exactly that if it introduces the tax change.
The planned tax would estrange large amounts of home owners in the same way the capital gains tax did to stock investors, as it would subject home sellers to millions in tax payments once they cash in on houses bought several years ago, Lai said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the