Two major units of Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), the nation’s largest industrial conglomerate, yesterday denied speculation that Tropical Storm Harvey had significantly affected the operation of their plants in Texas.
The two firms’ remarks came after the Chinese-language Economic Daily News yesterday reported that the shutdown of Formosa Plastics Corp’s (台塑) Texas plant might cause losses of more than US$60 million.
Losses from Harvey could also reach US$700,000 at a plant owned by Nan Ya Plastics Corp (南亞塑膠), the report said.
Formosa Plastics rejected the report in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, saying that the storm did not cause any substantial damage to their manufacturing equipment.
The Texas unit’s inventory remains sufficient for customers and most employees had returned to work on Wednesday, the nation’s largest producer of polyvinyl chloride said.
Two sets of steam boilers and one electricity generator at the plant have also begun operations, the firm’s statement said.
The company said its Texas facility would resume production as soon as possible after traffic gets back to normal in the region.
It did not provide a time table or an estimate of losses.
The Texas plant — which produces ethylene and polyvinyl chloride — is Formosa Plastics’ largest production base in the US.
The company also runs plants in the US states of Louisiana and Delaware.
The three plants generate nearly US$130 billion in revenue per year, company data showed.
The company has been working on an expansion project at its Texas unit, aiming to raise its capacity of low-density polyethylene by 400,000 tonnes per year and polypropylene by 250,000 tonnes per year by the third quarter of next year.
Nan Ya also said in a statement that operation of its Texas plant for making ethylene glycol was not severely affected by Harvey.
Nan Ya has kept equipment at the facility safe and shipments were delivered to customers on schedule, it said, adding that the Texas unit contributed only 1 percent of the company’s total sales of NT$275.29 billion (US$9.1 billion) last year.
Potential losses due to the temporary shutdown of the facility are limited to US$55,000 per day, the company forecast.
Its Texas plant is to resume operations when electricity supply returns to normal, the company said.
Nan Ya is to build a plant to produce ethylene glycol in Texas, given the lower natural gas costs there, company chairman Wu Chia-chau (吳嘉昭) said earlier this year.
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],”
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
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