■ Home appliances
Samsung, Guo Mei sign deal
South Korea's Samsung Electronics has signed a deal to supply home-appliance goods to leading Chinese electronics chain Guo Mei, a news report said yesterday. Samsung would provide products ranging from mobile handsets to refrigerators worth 455 billion won (US$448 million) to the Shanghai-based chain for one year under the deal, Yonhap news agency said. It was the largest single contract by a South Korean firm to supply a Chinese home-appliances chain, Yonhap said citing industry sources.
■ Telecoms
HP goes to China
Hewlett-Packard Co has won China's approval to make and sell mobile-phone handsets in the world's largest wireless market by users, state-run China Daily reported, citing a company official. The company is seeking partnerships with mobile operators, the newspaper said, citing Isaiah Cheung, director of mobile-business division at HP's China operations. HP plans to sell a "smart" phone model that has a built-in global positioning system and allows users to receive e-mails, the report said, without identifying the model.
■ Energy
Honda to enter solar market
Honda Motor Co plans to invest ¥10 billion (US$8.64 million) to enter the Japanese market for residential solar batteries, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information. Honda is ready to build a factory in the Japanese prefecture of Kumamoto to start mass production of solar batteries in 2007, Nikkei said. The batteries will likely sell for about ¥1.5 million each, the newspaper said. Tokyo-based Honda expects the market for solar batteries to triple in size in the next five years, Nikkei said, and grow even more in the next five-year period.
■ Trade
Regional FTA discussed
Officials from seven South and Southeast Asian nations met yesterday in the Bangladeshi capital to discuss the formation of a regional free-trade agreement, the foreign ministry said. Yesterday, foreign secretaries of India, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Bangladesh were to iron out the final details of the pact for the trade group, known as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, or BIMSTEC. The agreement on diversified and multilateral trade in goods, services and investment is expected to come into effect at the beginning of next July.
■ Taxes
Japan's sales tax set to rise
An increase in Japan's sales tax is inevitable because the government's share of contributions to the basic state pension is set to rise, said Hakuo Yanagisawa, head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's tax commission. The government needs to make drastic changes to the tax system by the year starting April 1, 2007, because its already generous contribution to the national pension will jump to half from one-third two years after that, Yanagisawa said yesterday on Fuji TV's Hodo 2001 program. His comments may indicate that the government plans to raise the consumption tax in the year from April 2007.
National Taiwan University (NTU) yesterday said it disqualified a person from an entrance examination for using AI smart glasses to cheat, along with two others for making untruthful statements in their curriculum vitae. The three applicants were given null scores, Taiwan’s highest-ranked university said, calling on prospective students to be honest in the admissions process. NTU registrar Lee Hung-sen (李宏森) said that the cheating applicant wore a hat and thick-rimmed glasses to the second written exam for medical school, claiming that they felt cold. Suspicions were aroused when the applicant stared oddly at the test for long stretches while steadily bringing the paper
A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mindanao in the Philippines at 7:38am today, prompting the US Tsunami Warning System to issue an alert for neighboring countries, including Taiwan. The system issued a purple alert indicating a "tsunami threat." The potential threat zone includes Taiwan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Yap and Palau. Philippine authorities were assessing the damage from the quake, with the office of civil defense seeking to verifying initial reports that 15 people had been killed and 129 injured in the region, mostly from falling debris. Arlene Hollero, disaster chief of Maasim town in the Philippines' Sarangani Province,
‘GRAY ZONE’ PRESSURE: Beijing’s activities are intended to create the deceitful impression that China has jurisdiction over the area around Taiwan, the CGA said Taiwan’s rights over its territorial waters and exclusive economic zone must not be violated by any country, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday, adding that it will not accept any unprovoked actions. The council issued the remarks in response to the China Coast Guard conducting maritime enforcement drills near eastern Taiwan and claiming to fully exercise China’s maritime administrative law enforcement authority. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) has been closely monitoring the situation and is taking concrete steps to defend the nation’s sovereignty and secure its waters, the council said. China has no sovereign rights over the waters off eastern
Heavy rain is expected to affect parts of Taiwan this week, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday as a meteorologist said the active part of the annual plum rain season has started. A stationary plum rain front and southwesterly winds would bring unstable weather and abundant moisture to Taiwan from today for about a week, with the heaviest rainfall forecast for tomorrow and Wednesday, the CWA said. The agency said western and northeastern Taiwan, and mountainous areas in the east and southeast, could expect showers or thunderstorms on those two days, with localized heavy rain possible. Other parts of
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