TRADE
Delegation to visit China
The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Wu Ming-ji (吳明機) is to lead a delegation to Beijing this morning to attend a small-scale informal negotiation with China regarding the cross-strait trade in goods agreement. “The half-day meeting with Bejing is aimed to narrow the gap on tariff reductions for industrial and agricultural products between Taiwan and China,” Wu told a press conference. The issues of special rules of product origin and trade remedies would also be discussed during the meeting, he said. The 13th round of formal talks on the agreement are expected to take place in Taipei after the presidential elections, Wu said.
CHIP TESTERS
SPIL posts revenue growth
Chip tester and packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (SPIL, 矽品精密) yesterday posted 3.7 percent sequential growth in revenue for last quarter of NT$20.77 billion (US$624.3 million), beating the company’s expectation of a 6.14 percent decline. In October, SPIL forecast that revenue last quarter would fall to between NT$18.8 billion and NT$20 billion. The better-than-expected figure came after SPIL posted a 2.4 percent monthly growth in revenue for last month of NT$6.93 billion from November’s NT$6.77 billion. Last year, SPIL’s total revenue edged lower 0.3 percent to NT$82.84 billion from NT$83.07 billion a year earlier.
SOLAR WAFERS
Green expects price rise
Green Energy Technology Inc (綠能科技), the nation’s largest solar wafer maker, yesterday said it expected a price uptick last quarter to extend into this quarter, driven by rising demand for high-end solar wafers. Green Energy said it was unable to fully satisfy customers’ demand and it would farm out production to solve the supply constraint. The company yesterday posted a 9.4 percent sequential increase in revenue for last month at NT$1.53 billion from NT$1.4 billion in November. For the whole of last year, revenue was up 1.45 percent to NT$15.5 billion from NT$15.28 billion in 2014.
GROCERIES
Delivery service launched
Singapore-based Honestbee (誠實蜜蜂) yesterday launched an online grocery concierge service in Taipei that pledges door-to-door delivery within one hour. Initially, the service will be only made available in the districts of Shihlin (士林), Daan (大安), Xinyi (信義) and Songshan (松山), the company said. The company said its grocery concierge service is also a part-time employment platform for those seeking extra income as designated shoppers and delivery people.
AUTOMAKERS
Mercedes reports good sales
Despite slow domestic economic growth, the luxury car market in Taiwan was hot last year, with 21,500 new Mercedes-Benz being sold, the Taiwan branch of the company said yesterday. It said one in every 1,000 people in Taiwan bought a Mercedes-Benz last year, increasing the company’s share of the Taiwan auto market to 5.2 percent. The strong sales were attributed to Mercedes-Benz Taiwan’s successful launch last year of 14 new models, which attracted nearly 30 percent of young buyers. This year will see a sharp growth in sales of the Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class and GLE-Class SUV models, the company said.
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