The Hsinchu Science-based Indus-trial Park's annual sales grew 6.5 percent last year to NT$70.55 billion, the National Science Council said yesterday, despite the global recession and uncertainty over a potential war in Iraq.
The park's administration pre-dicts sales this year would increase if a war in the Middle East does not injure the world economy.
According to the park's deputy director general, Randy Yen (
In addition, data from VLSI Research, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and Dataquest, Yen said, reveal good signs for the high-tech industry this year.
Yen said integrated-circuit industry sales of companies in the park last year grew 21.4 percent to NT$45.75 billion.
The industry accounts for 64.8 percent of the park's total sales.
Sales of precision machinery, biotechnology and communications grew by 12.4 percent, 6.1 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively. However, Yen said, annual sales for the computer-peripheral declined by 22.8 percent and photoelectric industries sales declined by 3.5 percent.
"Shifting plants to China and other developing countries caused the negative annual growth," Yen said.
Yen said the number of firms and employees in the park increased last year. By the end of last year, there were 335 firms and a total of 98,685 employees.
Last year the council promoted the Hsinchu park in the US and succeeded in luring many Tai-wanese high-tech professionals working in Silicon Valley back home.
"Last year, we had a record-breaking number of newly established firms -- 53," Yen said.
The new firms, mostly focusing on integrated-circuit and photoelectric industries, brought in NT$2.85 billion in investment.
Meanwhile, the number of firms kicked out by the park, 22, also broke a record. The figure is usually a single digit, officials said.
"If companies can't meet the original business plans they provided in their applications, we will not waste the government's resources on helping them," park director-general James Lee (李界木) said.
Chen Ming-huang (
"Some firms adopted alternative strategies to lower cost, such as merging with others or moving out of the park," Chen said.
The park is reviewing more than 40 applicants, with capital exceeding NT$1.5 billion, officials said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching