MANUFACTURING
Hon Hai to maintain staff
Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) yesterday said it will continue to recruit manpower and would maintain its employee number at more than 1 million worldwide to ensure the operation. The company’s statement came after media reported that its subsidiary Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), Apple Inc’s major supplier, would like to cut its massive employees with the help of industrial automation. Hon Hai said it will increase the use of industrial automation and will reduce the magnitude of hiring in the next few years, but it does not plan to slim the number of employees.
RETAIL
Strawberry ice cream offered
The nation’s two largest convenience store chain operators are both scheduled to begin sales of strawberry-flavored soft ice cream on Wednesday next week in a bid to raise the sector’s sales during the relatively slow season due to cold weather. President Chain Store Corp (PCSC, 統一超商), which operates the nation’s largest convenience store chain, 7-Eleven, is to launch the new flavor in cooperation with Japan’s Yotsuba Milk Products Co Ltd, with milk and strawberries directly imported from Japan to make the ice cream. Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店) is also planning to relaunch its strawberry soft ice cream next week, which the firm sold for a limited time last year.
REAL ESTATE
Shin Kong Life sells building
Shin Kong Life Insurance Co (新光人壽) yesterday sold an office building in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) to online game publisher Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (遊戲橘子) for NT$2.39 billion (US$76.58 million), the insurer said in a statement. The seven-story building might net NT$880 million in profit for Shin Kong life, the life insurance arm of Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金), the statement said. The move is part of the insurer’s continuing efforts to profit from real estate properties it bought years ago.
ELECTRONICS
Samsung launches Note Edge
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co yesterday launched its Galaxy Note Edge in Taiwan, which has now become one of the few markets in which the smartphone is being sold. The large-sized phone with a unique display that curves on one side had previously only been available in South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, the US and select European countries, since its release in October last year. When the Note Edge goes on sale in Taiwan later this month, its starting price is set to be NT$28,900.
REAL ESTATE
Rules to limit Chinese sales
Thanks to a number of restrictions placed on Chinese buyers of real estate, the number of transactions over the past several years has been limited, a brokerage firm said yesterday. H&B Housing (住商不動產) director Hsu Chia-hsin (徐佳馨) said Taiwan’s restrictions stipulate loans for Chinese buyers of real estate must not exceed 50 percent of the total sale value, that they cannot stay in the nation for more than four months at a time and that they cannot transfer their property for at least three years. According to statistics compiled by the Ministry of the Interior, Chinese buyers purchased 181 properties between 2002 — when the market opened up to Chinese investors — and last year. The total for the 181 transactions was NT$2.6 billion.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to