Praising the nation's biggest conglomerate for keeping its roots in Taiwan, Premier Yu Shyi-kun yesterday pledged to help expedite Formosa Plastic Group's NT$124.6 billion fourth-phase expansion project at its sixth naphtha cracker, which is estimated will boost the GDP by 2.3 percent.
"As the SARS outbreak and the magnet effect of the China market have delivered a serious blow to the nation's economy, we're obliged to do everything within our power to help clear the hurdles faced by local industries, especially when their investment capital is as big as this one," Yu said.
He made the pledge yesterday morning while receiving the Formosa Group's vice chairman Wang Yung-tsai (
Wang told Yu that he hoped the Cabinet would approve the company's request to hire 7,200 foreign laborers to work on the expansion project and that it would expedite the project's environmental impact assessment (EIA).
Yu responded by instructing the Environmental Protection Administration to complete the EIA within two to three months of receiving the company's proposal.
Formosa Plastics plans to present the proposal by the end of the month.
Yu also instructed the Council of Labor Affairs to review the conglomerate's request for permission to hire several thousand foreign construction workers as soon as possible.
Formosa Plastics plans to hire 12,000 manual laborers domestically during the project's two-year construction period in addition to the foreign workers.
The company says the new facility will employ more than 1,800 people once it is operational and have an annual revenue of NT$235 billion.
Over 170,000 more job opportunities are projected to be created in related industries nationwide.
Formosa Plastics has invested a total of NT$540 billion in the first-, second- and third-phase expansion projects of the sixth naphtha cracker, located in Mailiao, Yunlin County. Together, the three plants generate annual revenues of NT$610 billion.
During the construction of the previous expansion projects, which began in 1994, over 100,000 job opportunities were created in Yunlin County and 750,000 more in related industries nationwide.
The three plants now employee more than 8,000 people.
It is estimated that once the fourth-phase expansion project becomes operational, Formosa Plastics will produce 2.75 million tones of ethylene a year, making it the world's eighth-largest producer.
A naphtha cracker turns naphtha, made from crude oil, into ethylene and propylene.
Speculation is rife that Formosa Plastics decided to expand its petrochemical operations here because the demand in China has slowed down. The fourth-phase expansion project was scheduled to be finished by the end of this year.
Wang, however, dismissed such speculation.
"The delay in the construction of the fourth-phase expansion project was the result of various factors, none of which are related to the demand in China," he said yesterday, refusing to elaborate.
Ten years ago, the company planned to invest in a petrochemical project at Haichang, Fujian Province. The investment was blocked by the government, which allowed the group to develop the sixth naphtha cracker project as a payoff.
In September 2000, there were reports the company wanted to invest NT$400 billion in China's petrochemical industry. Chairman Wang Yung-ching (
Also see story:
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has