Mexico and Turkey on Friday agreed to speed up negotiations for a free-trade agreement in the wake of protectionist threats from US President Donald Trump.
Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis Videgaray and his visiting Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said the two governments have held seven rounds of talks and would meet again in the coming weeks.
“We have agreed to give a faster impetus to the search for an agreement,” Videgaray told reporters. “Today, more than ever, Mexico is open to the world and Mexico wants to build and strengthen its trade and investment ties with every country that we are friends with, regardless of geographic distance.”
Cavusoglu said Turkey wants to “intensify talks” on free trade with Mexico.
He also proposed to strengthen the MIKTA forum, a political and trade group made up of Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia.
“Together we will invest more efforts into making this forum more politically relevant, more effective and more visible,” Cavusoglu said.
The US, Canada and Mexico are preparing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as demanded by Trump, who said the pact a “catastrophe” for his country.
Faced with Trump’s threat to leave NAFTA if necessary, Latin America’s second-biggest economy is speeding up negotiations with the EU and seeking to tighten trade bonds with other nations.
SEMICONDUCTORS: The German laser and plasma generator company will expand its local services as its specialized offerings support Taiwan’s semiconductor industries Trumpf SE + Co KG, a global leader in supplying laser technology and plasma generators used in chip production, is expanding its investments in Taiwan in an effort to deeply integrate into the global semiconductor supply chain in the pursuit of growth. The company, headquartered in Ditzingen, Germany, has invested significantly in a newly inaugurated regional technical center for plasma generators in Taoyuan, its latest expansion in Taiwan after being engaged in various industries for more than 25 years. The center, the first of its kind Trumpf built outside Germany, aims to serve customers from Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia and South Korea,
Gasoline and diesel prices at domestic fuel stations are to fall NT$0.2 per liter this week, down for a second consecutive week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) announced yesterday. Effective today, gasoline prices at CPC and Formosa stations are to drop to NT$26.4, NT$27.9 and NT$29.9 per liter for 92, 95 and 98-octane unleaded gasoline respectively, the companies said in separate statements. The price of premium diesel is to fall to NT$24.8 per liter at CPC stations and NT$24.6 at Formosa pumps, they said. The price adjustments came even as international crude oil prices rose last week, as traders
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which supplies advanced chips to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday reported NT$1.046 trillion (US$33.1 billion) in revenue for last quarter, driven by constantly strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, falling in the upper end of its forecast. Based on TSMC’s financial guidance, revenue would expand about 22 percent sequentially to the range from US$32.2 billion to US$33.4 billion during the final quarter of 2024, it told investors in October last year. Last year in total, revenue jumped 31.61 percent to NT$3.81 trillion, compared with NT$2.89 trillion generated in the year before, according to
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