AIRLINES
CAL disinfects plane
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) yesterday said that it sterilized an airplane thoroughly after it flew on Saturday from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to Wuxi in China’s Jiangsu Province carrying a passenger who had a fever. Flight IT129 (CI8609) by Tigerair Taiwan Co (台灣虎航), the CAL-owned low-cost carrier, underwent a thorough disinfection in Wuxi before returning to Taoyuan airport on Saturday, CAL said. The company said that the passenger, who sat in row 11, was immediately taken to a hospital in China. It did not disclose the passenger’s nationality. CAL has provided Chinese authorities with information about the 42 other passengers who sat in rows 8 to 14, the airline said.
HYPERMARKETS
Carrefour branch to close
France-based hypermarket chain operator Carrefour SA on Friday said that its store on Dongxing Street in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) would cease operations on March 9 due to adjustments in the company’s business development plan. With the closure, the number of Carrefour stores in Taiwan will fall to 136, comprised of 68 hypermarkets and 68 24-hour supermarket-like Carrefour Market stores. The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Saturday reported that the closure of the store, which has operated for 16 years, is to come after the maturity of a lease for the site. Data compiled by Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) showed home prices within 700m of the Carrefour hypermarket on Dongxing Road averaged NT$714,000 (US$23,700) per ping (3.3m2), the second-highest such figure among the 13 hypermarkets in Taipei.
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained