■ New chairman for Taisugar
Kong Jaw-sheng (龔照勝), a board member of Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp (證交所), Tuesday took over the chairmanship of state-run Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar, 台糖).
Kong replaces Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁). Kong announced his resignation from the company earlier this month after he decided to join the Democratic Progressive Party's presidential campaign team.
Asked what he would do to continue Wu's plan for personnel downsizing -- a plan that involves reducing the company workforce by 45 percent, or 2,500 people, by January of next year -- Kong said that for now he will use a favorable pension system to encourage employees to retire.
"From a long-term perspective, I hope to use my skills in international banking and finance to help the company smoothly weather the transition," he said.
Taisugar reported a pretax loss of NT$960 million (US$28.2 million) for the first half of the year. Due to poor performance and labor disputes, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has not set a timetable for the privatization of Taisugar.
■ Winbond building wafer plant
Taiwanese memory-chip maker Winbond Electronics Corp (華邦電子) will finalize its plans to build a 12-inch wafer plant next month, one of the company's vice presidents said Tuesday.
Wilson Wen said Winbond has a list of potential partners for the NT$75 billion plant, but he declined to elaborate.
The company may use technology from Germany's Infineon Technologies AG or Japan's Sharp Corp to build the plant, which will have a monthly capacity of 40,000 pieces.
■ Ministry issues forgery warning
The Ministry of Finance yesterday cautioned credit card users to keep their eyes open when they use their credit cards to make purchases in public places like grocery stores.
"Hypermarkets, gas stations and department stores are places where most forged credit cards are duplicated," Huang Tien-mu (黃天牧), deputy director-general of the ministry's bureau of monetary affairs, said Tuesday.
Citing statistics from MasterCard International and Visa International, Huang hailed the government's successes in reducing credit card fraud.
Nationwide losses due to fake credit cards decreased from NT$1.59 billion in 2000 and NT$850 million in 2001 to NT$230 million in 2002 and NT$50 million this year.
To reduce credit cards fraud, the ministry has requested that all issuers upgrade their cards from magnetic cards to advanced integrated-circuit credit cards before 2006.
Huang said the government has also revised criminal laws to make them stricter. Laws now impose sentence of up to ten years for those convicted of credit card fraud.
■ Bike makers suffer shortage
Giant Manufacturing Co (巨大機械), Merida Industry Co (美利達工業) and other Taiwanese makers of bicycles face growing inventories of unfinished bikes because Shimano Inc cannot supply enough parts, a Chinese-language newspaper reported, citing company officials.
Taiwan's bicycle exports this year may fall short of estimates by about 20 percent, or 800,000 bikes, and inventories of unfinished bicycles are becoming a financial burden for the companies, the report said.
■ NT dollar higher
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday gained against its US counterpart, rising NT$0.028 to close at NT$34.033 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$426 million.";
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登精密), the sole extreme ultraviolet pod supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), yesterday said it has trimmed its revenue growth target for this year as US tariffs are likely to depress customer demand and weigh on the whole supply chain. Gudeng’s remarks came after the US on Monday notified 14 countries, including Japan and South Korea, of new tariff rates that are set to take effect on Aug. 1. Taiwan is still negotiating for a rate lower than the 32 percent “reciprocal” tariffs announced by the US in April, which it later postponed to today. The
ELECTRONICS: Strong growth in cloud services and smart consumer electronics offset computing declines, helping the company to maintain sales momentum, Hon Hai said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Saturday announced that its sales for last month rose 10 percent year-on-year, driven by strong growth in cloud and networking products amid the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company, also known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), reported consolidated sales of NT$540.24 billion (US$18.67 billion) for the month, the highest ever for the period, and a 10.09 percent increase from a year earlier, although it was down 12.26 percent from the previous month. Hon Hai, which is Apple Inc’s primary iPhone assembler and makes servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, said its cloud
Video streaming giant Netflix is launching a talent cultivation program in Taiwan aimed at producing high-quality Mandarin content, the company announced in a press release on Thursday. Netflix Chinese language content head Maya Huang (黃怡玫) said that Netflix has long invested in the Taiwanese market, citing the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity launched last year as an example. The fund would continue to dedicate resources to discovering content with the potential to be developed into Chinese-language projects, she added. The financing for the new talent projects seeks to create an ecosystem for content creators and professional development programs, she said. The talent projects
APPRECIATION: The central bank stepped in to stabilize the NT dollar after a surge in foreign institutional investment, triggered by optimism about tariffs and US Fed policy Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, as the central bank intervened in the currency market to curb the New Taiwan dollar’s appreciation against the US dollar. Foreign exchange reserves increased by US$5.48 billion from May, reaching an all-time high of US$598.43 billion, the central bank said on Friday. While the central bank did not disclose the scale of its intervention, Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民) said that the currency market remained relatively stable until the middle of last month. However, a shift occurred following the US Federal Reserve’s signal of a
RSS