Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp (
"Renowned brand names are company assets. If we do have to change it, it will cause great losses and jeopardize our corporate operations," said Chan Shih-chu (
On Wednesday, the Executive Yuan suggested an amendment to the Tobacco Hazards Act (
The amendment is to be submitted to the legislature soon for approval.
It is expected that Long Life and imported Mild Seven cigarettes, which take up 40 percent and 30 percent respectively of the nation's NT$62.5 billion (US$2.0 billion) annual cigarette market, would bear the brunt of the new rules.
Defending the company's right to retain the name "Long Life" on packaging, Chan said the new amendment would not be applied retroactively because the trademark had existed since 1959.
The company's labor union will also plead with lawmakers to ensure that the company's 7,000 employees can keep their jobs, Chan said.
According to Taiwan Tobacco's statistics, Long Life cigarettes contribute NT$25 billion in annual revenue, or one-third of the company's total sales.
"We hope the government will have second thoughts on green-lighting such a controversial regulation as this because it involves too many people and will lead to a reshuffle of the cigarette market," Chan said.
Generally a two-year grace period is given for affected companies to clear up stocks and prepare new designs.
The proposed amendment also casts a shadow on Taiwan Tobacco's plan to tap China's lucrative market, which consumes one-third of the world's cigarettes, Chan said.
The application process with Chinese authorities is under way, and the company expects to ship Long Life cigarettes across the Taiwan Strait as early as the end of the year.
"If `Long Life' is to be short-lived, I'm afraid that China will not accept it either," Chan said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS