■ Hitachi to boost production
Hitachi Ltd, Japan's second-biggest plasma-display maker, will speed up by about one year its plan to raise production capacity for flat panels to meet demand for large-screen televisions. The company will have the monthly capacity to make 300,000 plasma panels measuring 42 inches by the end of next year, compared with the end of 2008 as announced last month, Tokyo-based spokesman Atsushi Konno said yesterday. Hitachi currently makes 100,000 panels a month at its factory in Miyazaki prefecture, southwestern Japan, and will double capacity to 200,000 screens when it starts up another factory at the site in October. Better production yield due to the bigger capacity may help Hitachi turn around its flat-panel TV business, which had an operating loss in the fiscal first half.
■ Automotive
Ford's China sales boom
Ford Motor Co said yesterday that sales of its name-branded vehicles in China jumped 46 percent to a record 82,225 units, as the company performed well above industry expectations. "For Ford Motor Company in China, 2005 represented a record year of sales increase," Ford Motor China chief executive Cheng Meiwei (程美瑋) said in a statement. Changan Ford Automobile Co Ltd, Ford's flagship joint venture with Changan Automotive Group (長安汽車集團), saw annual sales last year jump 41 percent to 61,013 units. Ford currently has four locally produced models in China -- the Focus, Fiesta and Mondeo are all made by Changan Ford, while the Transit is produced by Jiangling Motors (江鈴汽車). Sales of all its affiliated brands in China, which include brands such as Volvo and Mazda topped 220,000 units last year, it said.
■ Beer
Top brewer eyes Vietnam
SABMiller, the world's second-biggest brewer, is to invest in a US$45 million brewery in Vietnam through a joint venture with local dairy products group Vinamilk. In a posting on its Web site, British-based SABMiller said it and Vietnam Dairy Products will each hold 50 percent of the southern Binh Duong province brewery. Once operational next year, the plant will have capacity of 500 hectoliters of beer, to be later increased to one million hectoliters, the company said. "We are delighted to have reached agreement with Vinamilk to enter the high growth Vietnamese beer market. We believe that the combination of both parties' expertise will result in a very successful venture," said Andre Parker, SABMillers Africa and Asia managing director in the statement.
■ Finance
China plans new exchange
China is planning a new exchange in Shanghai to trade financial derivatives as part of a broader plan to overhaul its rickety financial system, state press reported yesterday. The China Business News quoted unidentified sources as saying that the five major exchanges in the country -- the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the Shanghai Futures Exchange, Dalian Commodity Exchange and Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange -- could jointly launch the new exchange. The exchange would trade stock index futures, warrants, options and interest rate futures. A time frame for its establishment, likely to be in Shanghai, was not provided, but the project had already won approval from the State Council.
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
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
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
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