Taiwan’s first locally designed and built drilling vessel, the Polaris Australis, was yesterday revealed at the National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology’s Cijing campus.
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners K/S (CIP) and Dragon Prince Hydro-Survey Enterprise Co (銓日儀) unveiled the vessel, which cost about NT$500 million (US$15.87 million) and was jointly funded by Dragon Prince and Pan Formosa Engineering Co (環島工程).
Dragon Prince said that construction of the vessel, which was designed by Jong Shyn Shipbuilding Co (中信造船), was completed at the end of last year.
Photo: Huang Pei-chun, Taipei Times
University vice president Yu Ker-wei (俞克維) said that the institute provided training to the vessel’s crew.
CIP Taiwan also provided training by foreign experts on several areas throughout the vessel’s construction, project office director Marina Hsu (許乃文) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
The training program spanned three months, and included courses on equipment calibration and dynamic positioning as well as health, safety and environmental regulations, Hsu said, adding that local companies often fail to conform to such requirements.
“This is a very special case,” Hsu said of the risk that the companies faced in building the vessel.
“Normally a company would start building a vessel once it has at least five orders,” Hsu said.
However, Dragon Prince and Pan Formosa launched the project even though they did not have a single order, she said.
CIP has placed an NT$80 million order with Pan Formosa to use the vessel in its drilling trials starting this month off Changhua County to install pipelines for its planned wind farms.
Local companies are willing to take risks by betting on the success of such projects, Hsu said, adding that the government should provide more support in areas such as finance and negotiations to accelerate the localization of the wind power industry supply chain.
The government has banned foreign vessels from drilling the seabed within the nation’s territorial waters, citing security concerns.
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
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
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],”
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