TAXATION
Revenue to GDP ratio up
Taiwan’s tax revenues to GDP ratio last year hit 13.4 percent, an increase of 0.5 percentage points over 2017, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday. The ratio gauges the proportion of a nation’s total output that is collected by the government through taxation and indicates the degree to which a government controls a nation’s resources. Taiwan’s ratio has hovered between 11 and 14 percent since 2000. However, other nations in the region did much better last year, with South Korea reaching 20 percent, Japan 18.2 percent and Singapore 13.5 percent, while European nations far exceeded those levels, the ministry said. Boosted by stable economic growth and rising stock market turnover, total revenue collected last year was NT$2.39 trillion (US$77.54 billion at the current exchange rate), up 6 percent from 2017, it said.
AVIATION
CAL ‘back to normal’
China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) will resume its regular flight schedule today after a pilot shortage was resolved following the resolution of a week-long strike on Thursday last week. The airline canceled five flights yesterday, bringing the total number of flights canceled between Feb. 8 and yesterday to 214, the airline said. The airline has estimated its losses during that period, at NT$600 million.
CHIPMAKERS
TSMC to sue supplier
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Tuesday said it would seek compensation from a company that provided it with substandard raw materials that resulted in several hundred million US dollars in sales losses earlier this year, but it refused to give a name or specify the amount. It said the supplier should be held liable for its failure to detect heterogeneous polymers in the photoresist materials that caused the losses. The company’s statement came after a Chinese-language newspaper reported earlier in the day that Dow Chemical Co was the supplier and the chipmaker would seek NT$4 billion in compensation from the US firm. TSMC last month was forced to scrap tens of thousands of silicon wafers at its Fab 14B in Tainan, because of the defective raw materials. The production interruption cost it US$550 million in sales and led to a lower first-quarter sales forecast.
FOOD AND BEVERAGE
Beijing duck special offered
Cosmos Hotel TICC, a banquet and dining facility at the Taipei International Convention Center run by Taipei-based Cosmos Hotel & Resorts Group (天成飯店集團), has launched a Beijing duck promotion, communication official Blythe Chao (趙芝綺) said yesterday. It recently issued Beijing duck coupons priced at NT$1,480 each to allow guests to enjoy the famed delicacy at discounted prices, she said, adding that different discounts extend to Cantonese dim sum at the restaurant. Meanwhile, the group’s Cosmos Hotel Taipei (台北天成大飯店) has outperformed peers in terms of occupancy rates for the seventh consecutive year, thanks to its closeness to the Taipei Railway Station and relatively affordable rates, Chao said. The group’s newest property, the Grand Cosmos Resort Ruisui (瑞穗春天國際觀光酒店) in Hualien County, achieved an occupancy rate of nearly 80 percent over the Lunar New Year holiday and is almost fully booked for the long 228 Peace Memorial Day weekend, she said. The group spent NT$6 billion turning a large plot of land in Ruisui Township (瑞穗) into a hot-spring facility with 198 guest rooms and villas.
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