The Kaohsiung City Government will help resolve the financial deficit currently borne by the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC), which operates the Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, the city's MRT bureau director Chen Kai-ling (陳凱凌) said on Thursday.
Given a low passenger volume, the system posted an operating loss of NT$2.2 billion (US$67.8 million) last year and is expected to post another loss of NT$2.6 billion this year, KRTC general manager Yen Pang-chieh (顏邦傑) said.
With these figures, plus NT$1 billion in losses related to building problems during its construction phase, the system is projected to post nearly NT$6 billion in cumulative losses by the end of this year, more than half of the KTRC's total paid-in capital of NT$10 billion, Yen said.
Describing the company as being in dire financial straits, Yen said that it is also due to pay billions of New Taiwan dollars in construction fees to contractors during the current cost accounting period.
Saying that ticket revenues are not enough to offset operating losses, Yen said the company was seeking financial support from the city government.
In response, Chen said that the city government would provide NT$2.8 billion to help the company fill the deficit incurred during the construction stage.
Chen promised that the local government would do what it could to address the KRTC's financial crisis, while calling on the company to map out potential solutions, including ways to increase passenger volume and raise more capital.
Yen said the company did not do well in raising revenue and reducing expenditures until last year when it began implementing a retrenchment plan to cut operating losses.
He said the company had also tried to increase revenue by launching land development projects and renting out shopping space near MRT stations, but the results did not meet expectations because of the economic downturn.
The company has set a target of achieving average daily passenger volume of 360,000 this year and 500,000 next year. But to date, daily passenger volume has reached no more than 100,000, or about 25 percent of its forecast, Yen said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,