LITIGATION
Taipei taxi drivers sue Uber
A group of taxi drivers in Taipei yesterday filed a complaint with prosecutors, accusing ride-sharing service provider Uber Technologies Inc of tax evasion. Taipei City Professional Drivers’ Union president Cheng Li-chia (鄭力嘉) said Uber is registered in Taiwan as an information service provider, but is running a transportation business. Although Uber has revenue of about NT$3 billion ($94.9 million) since its entry to Taiwan four years ago, the company and its drivers have not paid any taxes, Cheng said. He urged the government not to abandon legal drivers “just to please a foreign business group,” and warned that taxi drivers are prepared to take drastic action to defend their work and survival rights.
MANUFACTURING
Solar Applied gets fine
Solar Applied Materials Technology Corp (光洋科) was fined NT$50,000 yesterday for failing to file financial statements for the first half by the deadline. The Taipei Exchange said the company should have submitted its financial statements by Monday. The company said it hired Nan Tai CPAs & Co (南台聯合會計師事務所) to help review its financial statements, replacing LH Chen & Co, CPAs (資信聯合會計師事務所). High-ranking executives and financial officers have since resigned.
AGED CARE
CTCI to team up with MCS
CTCI Corp (中鼎工程), which builds refinery and power plant facilities, yesterday announced that its affiliate CTCI Resources Engineering Inc (萬鼎工程) signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly develop long-term elderly care projects with Japan’s Medical Care Services Co Inc (MCS). The affiliate’s efforts in exploring Taiwan’s long-term care since 2013 will be greatly helped by the partnership with MCS, which is an experienced player in the field, CTCI said. MCS currently operates more than 270 full-service long-term care facilities in Japan, and the company has exported its business model to other countries including China, Singapore and Malaysia, CTCI said.
ELECTRONICS
Galaxy Note 7 launched
Samsung Electronics Co yesterday launched its new smartphone, the Galaxy Note 7, and said it aims to sell 20 percent more than last year’s Note 5 in Taiwan. The South Korean company is confident of sales of its new product in the second half of the year, citing replacement demand for upgrading to the 4G network. The Galaxy Note 7 is water-resistant and dust tight and is equipped with a 12-megapixel camera with dual pixel autofocus.
BANKING
BEA profits weighed down
The Bank of East Asia Ltd (BEA, 東亞銀行), the Hong Kong lender facing pressure from Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, yesterday said first-half profit dropped 38 percent as China’s slowing economy dragged on lending and caused loan impairments to surge. Net income fell to HK$2.1 billion (US$271 million) for the first six months of the year, from HK$3.35 billion a year earlier, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange. Impairment losses on loans climbed 60 percent to HK$1.24 billion, as profit at its China business slumped 56 percent, it said. “The banking sector in mainland China continues to be challenged in this environment by slowing loan growth, compressed net interest margins and increased default risk,” the company said in its statement.
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