Staff reporter, in Kuala Lumpur
Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) plans to extend the Taiwan Expo to Thailand and India next year in a bid to help Taiwanese manufacturers tap into more southbound markets, TAITRA chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said yesterday.
“The Taiwan Expo has served as an effective platform for companies from a wide range of industries to showcase their products and total solutions in regional markets,” Huang told a news conference after the exhibition’s opening ceremony at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center.
Photo: Huang Pei-chun, Taipei Times
TAITRA representatives in regional markets would continue to assist Taiwanese firms with marketing and communicating with potential business partners after the exhibition finishes, Huang said.
The business-to-business (B2B) Taiwan Expo, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and organized by TAITRA, is part of the government’s New Southbound Policy, which aims to increase the presence of Taiwanese firms in ASEAN nations, the sub-continent, Australia and New Zealand.
The exhibition in Kuala Lumpur is the fourth Taiwin Expo this year, following fairs held in Indonesia in May, Vietnam in July and the Philippines in September.
TAITRA invited 180 Taiwanese companies from eight industries, including cosmetics, solar power and food and beverage to participate in the expo in Malaysia.
TAITRA set up a pavilion to promote Taiwan’s halal-certified products, including bubble milk tea, eyeing Malaysia’s Muslim population, which accounts for 64 percent, or 17.13 million, of the country’s total population, Huang said.
TAITRA sees Malaysia as a gateway for Taiwanese companies to tap into Middle Eastern markets, with halal product exports from Malaysia to the Middle East and other ASEAN nations reaching 42 billion ringgit (US$99.98 million) last year, he said.
When asked to comment on the less than 50 percent budget execution rate this year estimated by the New Southbound Policy Office (NSPO), Huang said that the public should not examine the progress of the policy based on the budget execution rate.
Concern about the effectiveness of policy execution has risen since the Presidential Office on Oct. 22 said this year’s budget for the NSPO is NT$1.95 million, with the government forecasting that the budget execution rate would be between 40 percent and 50 percent.
“The point of the policy was never about how much of its budget is spent, but to see how to maximize the limited resources we have to achieve the goal,” Huang said.
TAITRA’s budget related to the policy was allocated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the budget execution rate would be 100 percent this year, he added.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS