Taiwan-US trade rises 7.1%
Taiwan ranked as the US’ 10th-largest trading partner in the first 10 months of the year, with two-way trade totaling US$56.4 billion, up 7.1 percent from a year earlier, statistics released on Tuesday by the US Department of Commerce showed.
In the 10-month period, Taiwanese imports from the US rose 6.6 percent from a year earlier to US$22.27 billion, while Taiwanese exports to the US grew 7.4 percent from a year ago to US$34.15 billion, leaving Taiwan with a trade surplus of US$11.88 billion, up 8.9 percent from a year earlier, the data showed.
In the same 10-month period, bilateral trade between the US and China totaled US$483.6 billion, making Beijing the second-largest trading partner of Washington, the data showed.
Yahoo sees jump in ad clients
Yahoo Inc yesterday forecast that its native advertising clients in Taiwan would double in number in the next two months, given strong demand from small and medium-sized enterprises.
Native advertising allows publishers and advertisers to deliver paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ads belong there.
Eponine Chen (陳婉怡), senior director of Yahoo’s search marketing in Taiwan, said at a media briefing that the company has signed up more than 1,000 local customers since the pay-per-click ads platform was launched in late June.
The company expects the number of its native ads customers to double before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday on Feb. 18, Chen said.
Synnex November sales down
Synnex Technology International Corp (聯強電子), Asia’s largest distributor of information technology products and electronics components, yesterday reported revenue of NT$25.97 billion (US$830.8 million) for last month, a decline of 18 percent from a year earlier, as increased sales of telecom items failed to offset the decline in orders for information technology, consumer electronics and integrated circuit products.
From January through last month, cumulative revenue increased 1 percent to NT$297.9 billion from the same period last year, the company said in a statement.
Sales of information technology products accounted for 54 percent of Synnex’s total revenue in the first 11 months, while IC products made up 26 percent, consumer electronics 15 percent and telecom items 5 percent.
Epistar sales may fall further
Epistar Corp’s (晶元光電) consolidated sales could continue falling this month after declining 7.6 percent month-on-month and 14.7 percent year-on-year to NT$1.8 billion last month, Primasia Securities Co said yesterday.
The sales decline at the nation’s largest LED chipmaker was attributable to a low 50 percent utilization rate for gallium nitride (GaN)-based LEDs, as well as a seasonal slowdown for four-element (aluminum gallium indium phosphide, AlGaInP) LEDs, Primasia said in a client note.
For this quarter, Epistar’s sales could decline by nearly 30 percent from last quarter, the brokerage forecast.
Intel unveils IoT platform
Intel Corp on Tuesday unveiled its Internet of Things (IoT) platform — a set of components designed to make it easy for companies to equip their electronic systems with Internet connections.
The Santa Clara, California-based firm said the new platform would let customers get to market faster with simpler products that would deliver secure information.
The company’s business division responsible for the IoT is forecast to grow about 18 percent to more than US$2 billion in sales this year, Doug Davis, the unit’s general manager, said at an event in San Francisco.
“The Internet of Things must scale,” Davis said. “We’re talking about billions of devices that will be connected by the end of this decade.”
Biofund sets up three firms
Diamond Biofund Inc (鑽石生技), the nation’s largest investment fund focusing on the biomedical industry, on Tuesday said that it has invested NT$1.8 billion to set up three companies to develop early-stage biomedical technology in Taiwan.
The fund set up a drug company with capital of NT$1 billion, which will start phase one clinical trials for two drugs by the end of 2016, it said.
The fund also established a drug company with capital of NT$300 million to develop technology that controls metabolic enzymes, and 3D Global Biotech Inc, a company with capital of NT$500 million, to utilize 3D printing technology to make dental transplant and bone substitute, it said.
November tax revenues up 10%
Tax revenues increased 9.9 percent year-on-year to NT$187 billion (US$5.99 billion) last month, as a recovering economy boosted corporate and personal income taxes, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
Corporate income tax rose 4 percent to NT$3.2 billion, while personal income tax increased 25.9 percent to NT$5.3 billion, the ministry’s statistics department deputy director Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳) told a news briefing.
For the first 11 months of the year, tax revenues rose to a record NT$1.85 trillion, up 8.2 percent from the same period last year.
For the full year, tax revenues could exceed the budget by at least NT$100 billion, Hsu 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],”
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
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