The nation’s machinery makers should lead in the era of “Industry 4.0” to avoid wasting resources, the head of the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said yesterday, adding a call for close collaboration among research institutes, academia and the government.
“The industrial end is the side that knows where the demands are,” TAMI chairman Alex Ko (柯拔希) said on the sidelines of the Taipei Manufacturing Technology Show at the Taipei World Trade Center’s Nangang Exhibition Hall.
Ko said that Taiwan has advantages in the IT industry, which machinery players could use to create new opportunities in smart manufacturing.
Photo: CNA
He said IT companies such as Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) and Advantech Co (研華) have joined the trend.
The association billed last year as the first year of “smart machinery” manufacturing and is expecting more orders of such products in the next two years, Ko said.
“We have done more than enough to promote Industry 4.0 as the main axis of the machinery industry,” Ko said, adding that now is the time to sell such products to the world.
Fatex Co (發得科技) is one of the companies taking part in the exhibition that has joined the Industry 4.0 bandwagon, Ko said.
The company’s production line is equipped with automatic virtual metrology (AVM), with many of its smart applications destined to reach the Turkish market by the end of this month and Indian customers next month, he said.
Taiwan’s machinery equipment exports fell 6.8 percent annually to US$20.1 billion (NT$620.8 million) last year, and the lackluster performance continued in the first quarter, with exports dropping 9.1 percent annually to US$4.89 billion, government data showed.
Overall, the machinery industry reported output of NT$955 billion last year, down 3 percent from a year earlier, Ko said.
However, Ko is optimistic about the industry’s outlook this year, citing more than NT$15 billion in orders received last month at a machine tool exhibition in Shanghai and a few billion New Taiwan dollars in orders collected at a plastics and rubber exhibition in Shanghai the same month.
In addition, the incoming Democratic Progressive Party administration, which is to take office on May 20, has called smart manufacturing one of the nation’s five “creative industries.”
“We hope investment by the government will go straight to the machinery industry, which would help it become the engine to drive everyone who is onboard,” Ko said.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese machine tool makers are eyeing aerospace opportunities, valued at US$5.2 trillion in business potential per year, TAMI machine tool committee chairman David Chuang (莊大立) said at a separate event.
Chuang said the industry is facing challenges from Japanese and South Korean peers in terms of less favorable tariffs and foreign-exchange rates, and therefore local companies should seek to cooperate to boost competitiveness.
In the first quarter, the nation’s machine tool exports dropped 20.7 percent annually to US$634 million due to depreciation of the yen and won against the US dollar, TAMI 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],”
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained