The US is to send customs and security officials to Taiwan's largest harbor as part of Washington's global anti-terrorism efforts, with Kaohsiung being one of the 20 harbors worldwide staffed with US anti-terrorism officials.
Tom Ridge, secretary of US Department of Homeland Security, unveiled last Thursday a new port safety plan to protect the US from possible dangers arriving on the more than 8,000 ships that enter the country from all over the world each year.
Under the port safety plan, the US Department of Homeland Security plans to post customs and border security officers at major seaports overseas, hopefully beginning around the end of this year, to help inspect containers and screen high-risk ships before they ever reach US shores, Ridge said.
Taipei has been cooperating with Washington in battling terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
Among cooperative measures already in place is a "container information checking system," under which all US-bound containers are scrutinized by X-ray.
According to Ministry of Finance officials, the nation's Directorate-General of Customs entered a cooperation agreement with the US soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks to jointly inspect and screen containers departing Taiwan for the US.
The US Customs Service has also dispatched officials to Taiwan to facilitate the container checking efforts, ministry officials said.
Taiwan, however, is now the only port country that has not signed the US's Container Security Initiative (CSI), which is devised to enable US-bound container screening in foreign ports.
According to officials from the Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau, the US Customs Service is hoping that Taiwan will sign the CSI agreement as soon as possible.
Failure to do so could jeopardize Taiwan containers' rights to be processed speedily at US ports, the US Customs Service sources have warned.
Unconfirmed sources said yesterday that due to Beijing's obstruction and the outbreaks of SARS, Taiwan has yet to sign the CSI, which was announced by the US Customs Service Feb. 22, 2002 to strengthen port and maritime security without interrupting trade flow.
Both Taiwan's foreign ministry spokesman Richard Shih (石瑞琦) and the US defacto embassy in Taiwan, the American Institute in Taiwan, were tight-lipped on the report.
Taipei-Washington ties have strengthened under the Bush administration, despite the lack of diplomatic links as Washington continues to recognise Beijing's ultimate authority.
Kaohsiung is the world's fifth largest port.
Out of 8.4 million containers handled there last year, some 600,000 were shipped to the US, including some trans-shipped to other countries, according to Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau officials.
So far, US Customs Service officials are already posted in eight of the top 20 ports around the world -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Rotterdam, Bremen, Hamburg, Antwerp, Nagoya and Le Havre.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS