FSC touts deregulation
Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman William Tseng (曾銘宗) said that a plan to allow wider share price fluctuations in the local bourse to allow daily increases or drops of up to 10 percent, from the current 7 percent, would be unveiled later this month or early next month, as the commission is discussing the matter with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the GRETAI Securities Market and the Taiwan Securities Association before finalizing the plan.
Tseng made the remark on
Saturday during an interview with Wealth publishing group chairman Hsieh Chin-ho (謝金河) on a business news program on Eastern TV News, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported.
Tseng also said the commission is planning more deregulation, as well as complementary measures, in a bid to improve local capital markets, the report said.
Semiconductor BB ratio falls
The book-to-bill (BB) ratio for North America-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers, such as Applied Materials Inc, dropped below one — to 0.98 — last month, industry association SEMI said on Friday.
The three-month average of worldwide bookings was US$1.37 billion in orders last month, down 1.1 percent year-on-year, but up 12.3 percent month-on-month, SEMI said in a statement.
As the three-month average of worldwide billings also rose 3.1 percent year-on-year to US$1.39 billion and 17 percent month-on-month, the book-to-bill ratio fell to 0.98 last month from 1.02 in November last year, the association said.
A ratio of 0.98 means that US$98 worth of orders were received for every US$100 of product billed during the month.
A ratio of above one implies a more optimistic outlook, while a ratio of less than one suggests weakness.
AUO to recruit 1,500 workers
AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), the nation’s No. 2 LCD maker, plans to recruit 1,500 engineers this year to expand its technology workforce, the company said in a statement on Friday.
The new recruits require backgrounds in the fields of process equipment, display development, electronics and integration testing, the company said.
About 100 engineers from the new hires will be assigned to work in the company’s sixth-generation factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, China, AUO said.
Acer notebook market share up
Acer Inc (宏碁) expects to continue to win more ground from rivals in consumer notebooks in the domestic market amid its efforts to achieve double-digit local sales growth in the first quarter of this year.
In the second half of last year, Acer’s Taiwan market share in consumer notebooks had increased from 18 percent in September to 23 percent in November and 23.9 percent last month, Acer president of Taiwan operations Towny Huang (黃鐘鋒) said on Friday, adding that the figure is expected to hit 25 percent by the end of March.
The company’s local revenue in the fourth quarter of last year grew 5 percent from a year earlier, Huang said.
The company is also bidding for school projects to adopt laptops that run Google Inc’s Chrome operating system, in a move to cash in on the niche computer category, he said.
Low birth rate a concern: NDC
Taiwan’s declining birth rate will soon take a toll on the nation’s workforce, the National Development Council (NDC) said on Tuesday last week, adding that the working population would fall by an average of 180,000 people annually from 2016.
The council estimated that the size of the working population aged between 15 and 64 would reach its peak at 17.37 million people this year and begin to slip next year until 2060, resulting in increasingly large personnel shortages.
The demographic dividend that has helped catalyze the nation’s economic development in the past will also come to an end in about a decade, the council said.
The demographic dividend refers to the period of time when the workforce in a nation accounts for more than two-thirds of the total population.
Due to the impact of declining births and an aging society, the council estimated that the demographic dividend will end in 2028.
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