GOVERNMENT
Uber payments withheld
The Administrative Enforcement Agency on Friday ordered 33 credit-card-issuing banks to withhold payments collected on behalf of Uber Technologies Inc in a compulsory execution of back fines and taxes owed by the US-based ride-sharing service. Banks that oppose the order can file a dissent with the agency’s Taipei office detailing their reasons, it said. Outstanding fines and taxes owed by Uber stand at NT$1.06 billion (US$34.87 million) after more than NT$10 million was confiscated from Uber’s bank accounts in March, the agency said.
AUTOMAKERS
RAC may export to Japan
Taiwanese-made electric buses might enter the Japanese market next year, electric vehicle manufacturer RAC Electric Vehicles Inc (華德動能) said. The firm in April signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Japan’s Sumitomo Corp as part of a deal to export RAC’s buses to Northeast Asia. RAC on Friday said the buses are likely to be first introduced in Okinawa next year. The company said it has also signed an MOU with a firm in China’s Shandong Province to export electric bus parts to China in the second half of this year.
ELECTRONICS
Vive on Steam summer sale
HTC Corp (宏達電) on Friday said that it is offering a discount on its virtual reality headset, the HTC Vive. The company has joined forces with the Steam online distribution platform to mark down the Vive’s price during the online firm’s summer sale, it said. The sale started at 1am on Friday and is to run through 1am on Thursday next week. Steam users can purchase the Vive for NT$26,788 (US$881), instead of its original price of NT$28,288, HTC said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by