AIRLINES
CAL’s A350 to arrive in July
Taiwan’s largest air carrier, China Airlines (CAL, 華航), yesterday announced that it would receive its first A350-900 — Airbus SAS’ newest wide-body jetliner — next year. CAL, which has ordered 14 A350s, is to be the first Taiwanese carrier to operate the new aircraft. Assembly work on the first of the aircraft ordered is to begin next month, with delivery scheduled for July, CAL said.
EMPLOYMENT
Industrial job vacancies fall
Job vacancies in the industrial and service sectors totaled 199,000 at the end of August, translating into a job vacancy rate of 2.61 percent, according to the results of a semi-yearly survey published yesterday by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. Vacancies fell 41,000 from February and 39,000 from the same period last year, mainly due to an economic slowdown. Meanwhile, the job vacancy rate fell 0.56 percentage points from February and 0.54 percentage points from the same period last year, the agency said. At the end of August, there were 73,000 vacancies in the manufacturing sector, accounting for 36.5 percent of the total.
STOCK MARKETS
Fund postpones meeting
The National Stabilization Fund Committee yesterday said that it would convene for a quarterly meeting on Jan. 18 at 4pm to deliberate whether the fund would continue to remain active in the market. The committee said that its quarterly meetings usually take place before the 15th day of a month, but for the first quarter of next year the date has been changed to avoid conducting the talks before the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections. First activated in August at the onset of a global stock rout, the fund was kept active in October due to lingering uncertainties caused by expectations of an interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve.
SECURITIES
AUO tops overbought list
The Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday said that the securities net overbought position by foreign investors last week was NT$8.79 billion (US$266.2 million). The three securities that reported the highest overbought positions by foreign investors during period were AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電), Innolux Corp (群創) and Inventec Corp (英業達). The top three securities that reported the highest oversold positions by foreign investors were Siliconware Precision Industries Co Ltd (矽品精密), E.Sun Financial Holding Co (玉山金控) and SinoPac Financial Holdings Co (永豐金控).
BANKING
Banks launch HCE support
MasterCard and Visa yesterday launched their host card emulation (HCE) mobile payment solution for credit cardholders in Taiwan. HCE allows any near-field communication app on Android devices running version 4.4 or later to emulate a smartcard through tokenization, enabling consumers to use their smartphones to make payments without additional hardware, while permitting financial institutions to host payment accounts in a secure virtual cloud. E.Sun Commercial Bank (玉山銀行) is the first financial institution in the nation to add Visa’s HCE support to its mobile wallet application, while MasterCard has enlisted Taishin International Bank (台新銀行), CTBC Bank Co Ltd (中國信託銀行) and Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行), with plans to expand the number of partner banks to 23 next year.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts