AIRLINES
Tigerair inks training deal
Tigerair Taiwan (台灣虎航), a joint venture between Taiwan’s China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) and Singapore’s Tiger Airways, said yesterday that it is partnering with APEX Flight Academy to train its pilots and supply flight crew. The academy’s training base at Taitung’s Fong Nien Airport has a flight simulator, weather station, and single and twin-engine aircraft equipped with the latest avionics. With the partnership, Tigerair pilots are to be trained at the academy, while graduates from the academy are to be given priority whenever the airline is recruiting flight crew. The arrangement will help nurture local talent and prevent over-reliance on foreign pilots, the airline said. Almost all Taiwanese airline pilots are trained in the US or Australia.
SOLAR POWER
Neo shares jump 3.85%
Neo Solar Power Corp (新日光) shares jumped 3.85 percent yesterday after the solar-cell manufacturer said a day earlier that it is expected to have a better third quarter on the back of rising demand and product prices, dealers said. The stock also saw strong buying emerge soon after the local bourse opened, as investors took cues from a company plan that a subsidiary will launch a listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, the dealers said. Buying spread to other solar-energy stocks in the local equity market due to their relatively small market capitalization at a time when large-cap stocks remained slow, which prompted investors to move their funds to smaller issues, the dealers added. The stock price of Neo Solar rose to NT$24.25 yesterday, out-performing the TAIEX, which increased 0.28 percent.
BANKING
Bank announces Taipei event
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is to hold an event in Taipei in September to introduce business opportunities with the bank in emerging markets to Taiwanese business representatives. Thomas Maier, managing director for Infrastructure at the bank, is to attend the briefing on Sept. 8, Michael Hsu (徐佩勇), director-general of the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of International Organizations, said at a news conference. Unlike the bank’s business briefings of previous years, which have focused on single, specific industries, this year’s event will be expanded to cover business opportunities in several sectors, including infrastructure, “green” energy, information and communications technology, and agriculture, Hsu said. The goals of the bank, which is headquartered in London, are to promote economic development, market-oriented economies, multi-party democracy and private entrepreneurial ventures, he said.
AIRLINES
Travel fair promotes Japan
Two local airlines opened a travel fair yesterday to encourage travel to less popular Japanese destinations as part of an effort to seek a more diversified customer base in a mature Taiwan-Japan aviation market. The free fair is supported by 20 Japanese administrative areas that are less traveled, including Aomori, Akita and Ehime prefectures, and Asahikawa and Abashiri cities in Hokkaido. About 120,000 visitors are likely to attend the four-day fair, which was organized by China Airlines, TransAsia Airways and an airport catering service jointly owned by the two airlines and Uni Air, CAL chairman Sun Hung-hsiang (孫洪祥) said. About 1.14 million Taiwanese visited Japan in the first four months of this year, an increase of 26 percent year-on-year, the Japan Tourism Agency 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
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