Macquarie Capital Ltd yesterday said it plans to form a joint venture with mobility solution provider 7Starlake Co (喜門史塔雷克) by the end of this year to explore opportunities in Taiwan’s emerging self-driving vehicle market.
“We have been eyeing the development of new markets [in Taiwan], such as the driverless car market,” said Ryan Chua (蔡毅霆), director of the Sydney-based firm’s operations in Taiwan, adding that the actual size of the joint venture requires more discussion.
Macquarie Capital has also been pouring investments in Taiwan’s solar power and offshore wind energy sectors.
New Taipei City-based 7Starlake is seen as a suitable business partner, given its hands-on experience in the self-driving car sector, Chua said at a Taipei ceremony for the signing of a memorandum of understanding.
The two companies will try to connect the autonomous-driving technologies with a decentralized energy grid, which is in line with the government’s long-term energy plan, 7Starlake president Martin Ting (丁彥允) said.
7Starlake has conducted trial runs of its driverless car service in Kaohsiung and Taipei through collaborations with EasyMile SAS, a French-based start-up that manufactures driverless electric buses.
Self-driving cars are not allowed on public roads in Taiwan, but the government is planning to relax regulations governing real-road tests of autonomous vehicles
The Ministry of Economic Affairs has finished a draft bill for a “regulatory sandbox” for driverless car developers to experiment with their models on open roads under some circumstances.
The bill has been given priority during the current legislative session, the ministry said last month.
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
In the wake of strong global demand for AI applications, Taiwan’s export-oriented economy accelerated with the composite index of economic indicators flashing the first “red” light in December for one year, indicating the economy is in booming mode, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Moreover, the index of leading indicators, which gauges the potential state of the economy over the next six months, also moved higher in December amid growing optimism over the outlook, the NDC said. In December, the index of economic indicators rose one point from a month earlier to 38, at the lower end of the “red” light.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科) shares yesterday notched their best two-day rally on record, as investors flock to the Taiwanese chip designer on excitement over its tie-up with Google. The Taipei-listed stock jumped 8.59 percent, capping a two-session surge of 19 percent and closing at a fresh all-time high of NT$1,770. That extended a two-month rally on growing awareness of MediaTek’s work on Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), which are chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. It also highlights how fund managers faced with single-stock limits on their holding of market titan Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are diversifying into other AI-related firms.
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