ONLINE SALES
Groupon to refund coupons
Groupon Taiwan yesterday said that unused coupons it has issued can be fully refunded, one day after it announced plans to suspend operations in the nation. The company said that if customers still have coupons for commodity items and travel products, they can use them before their expiration date. If they want full refunds, they can apply to the firm’s customer service center before Oct. 31, it said. Customer services will be provided until the end of March next year, it added. If customers want to return items already delivered, they can contact customer service centers within a seven-day trial period, it said.
SMARTPHONES
HTC tops sales list
HTC Corp (宏達電) topped a list of firms in terms of domestic sales volume last month with a 21.6 percent market share, industry sources said yesterday. Samsung Electronics Co was second with a 21.4 percent share, ahead of Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) with a 13 percent share, Apple Inc with 11.8 percent and Sony Corp with a 9.6 percent share, the sources said. The overall sales volume was 631,000 units last month in the smartphone market, down 2.9 percent from a month earlier, they said. Apart from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the local smartphone market was largely dominated by low-to-mid-end models last month, the sources said.
CHIPMAKERS
UMC announces production
United Microelectronics Co (UMC, 聯電) yesterday said it has entered high-volume production for touch IC applications manufactured on its 0.11 micrometer eFlash process. The specialized technology, introduced by UMC in late 2012, was developed for next-generation touch controller ICs and Internet of Things applications, the company said in a statement. UMC said the technology provides smaller and faster logic devices that have higher performance results, while enabling the integration of higher-density embedded Flash and SRAM for use in microcontrollers for touch-screen products of all sizes.
BANKING
Mega approves issuance
State-run Mega Financial Holding Co (兆豐金控) on Tuesday said its board has approved the issuance of 1.15 billion new common shares in a bid to increase capital. Seventy-eight percent of the new shares are to be acquired by the company’s stakeholders, Mega Financial said in a statement. Another 12 percent will be reserved for employees, while the remaining 10 percent are to be sold to the public, the statement said. The company expects to finalize the price of the new shares by the end of next month and complete the new issuance before the end of this year.
CHOCOLATIERS
Lindt wins legal stoush
Lindt yesterday savored a victory over Haribo in a long-running legal battle after a German federal court ruled that chocolate teddy bears made by the Swiss giant were not a copy of the German sweets maker’s gummy bears. The German candy manufacturer took Lindt to court in 2012 after the Swiss chocolatier began selling their “Lindt Teddy” figurines in 2012 for the Christmas season. A German court initially ruled in favor of Haribo, but an appellate court threw out that verdict, finding that the chocolate teddies could not be mistaken for Haribo’s jelly sweets. To end the dispute, the case was brought to the German Federal Court of Justice for a final ruling.
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