It will likely take five to 10 years for credit card holders to be able to pay on smartphones and tablets in Taiwan, Visa International (Asia-Pacific) LLC said yesterday, adding that it would build more Visa payWave machines to facilitate the development of mobile payment.
“Taiwan still has quite a long way to go,” Visa International country manager in Taiwan Macro Ma (麻少華) told a media briefing.
Remote payment has grown rapidly in Taiwan, but the development of near-field payment, via near-field communication (NFC) technologies or other methods, might determine mobile payment’s prosperity in the long-term future, Ma said.
On top of the widespread use of NFC smartphones, retail channels have to set up more wave machines, Ma said.
There are about 30,000 Visa payWave machines across the nation, accounting for only 10 percent of Visa International machines, according to the company’s statistics.
Ma said the number of Visa payWave machines might be boosted to 60,000 within a year, but the company might have difficulty reaching the “real” popularization within five to 10 years.
In related news, Visa International announced yesterday that the number of Visa Debit cards used in Taiwan has exceeded 13 million since their launch in July 2000.
A total of 19 financial institutions support the issuance of Visa Debit cards currently, company data showed.
From October last year to September, the total payment volume of Visa Debit cards reached NT$57.7 billion (US$1.83 billion), an increase of 24 percent from the same period a year ago.
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
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