REAL ESTATE
Banks move on Ting Lu land
Creditor banks yesterday filed two motions for provisional attachments of assets and land held by a subsidiary of scandal-plagued Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團) due to it defaulting on a loan. The motions were filed to protect the creditor banks after Ting Lu Development Co (頂率開發), Ting Hsin Group’s real-estate unit, failed to pay the NT$6.5 billion (US$205 million) it owed on a syndicated loan by the deadline on Wednesday last week. The loan syndicate petitioned the Shilin District Court to freeze Ting Lu’s Neihu (內湖), Taipei, headquarters and also asked the Banciao District Court in New Taipei City to seize a plot of land in the municipality’s Sanchong District (三重) that the developer used as collateral in the syndicated loan. The creditor banks said that Ting Lu could avoid the seizure of its assets if it repays the loan before the courts hand down their rulings on the bank’s requests, with the verdicts expected within a week. The Ministry of Finance said the legal action taken by the banks was aimed at ensuring the creditors’ rights. Mega International Commercial Bank (兆豐國際商銀), the lead bank in the loan consortium, said it expected the sale of the plot of land in Sanchong would raise enough money to pay off the loan.
PANEL MAKERS
Blaze damages TPK plant
Touch-panel manufacturer TPK Holding Co (宸鴻) yesterday said that a fire has damaged part of its advanced touch-on-lens (TOL) technology equipment at its factory in Xiamen in China’s Fujian Province. No casualties from the blaze were reported, the company said in a statement filed with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The fire broke out at noon on Saturday and was put out about two hours later.TPK said it hopes to resume production at the factory as soon as possible as the fire did not directly affect equipment for the mass production of TOL touch screens. Only equipment for product sampling and researching was damaged, it said. To cope with the disruption of production, TPK plans to adjust its production lines in adjacent factories upward, it said. The company said it would seek compensation from its insurance company.
TECHNOLOGY
SPIL posts 5% decline
Siliconware Precision Industries Co Ltd (SPIL, 矽品精密), the world’s No. 2 chip packager, yesterday posted a 5 percent sequential decline in revenue after recording a NT$6.85 billion figure for last month. SPIL made NT$7.21 billion in November last year, bringing its revenue to NT$21.43 billion for the final quarter of that year — a figure representing a 1 percent sequential drop from the previous quarter’s NT$21.65 billion. Last quarter’s revenue beat the forecast SPIL made in October, when it had expected revenue to shrink by between 3 and 9 percent quarter-on-quarter to a range of NT$21 billion to NT$19.7 billion.
AUTO INDUSTRY
Kenda plans Taiwan plant
Tire manufacturer Kenda Rubber Industrial Co (建大輪胎) yesterday said that its board has approved a plan to spend a maximum of NT$1 billion to buy a piece of land in central Taiwan that it will build a new factory on. The company plans to set up a special task to scout for the best site, according to a statement that it submitted to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. In a separate filing, the tire maker said its board also gave the go-ahead on its proposal to budget NT$5 billion to build a research center in the same region of the country.
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