■ Copyrights
Movie studios sue Samsung
Walt Disney Co, Time Warner Inc and three other movie studios sued Samsung Electronics Co, saying the company's DVD players allow consumers to circumvent encryption features that prevent unauthorized duplication. Technicians for the studios could disable the piracy prevention feature on the DVD players by pressing a sequence of numbers on the remote control, the studios said in a complaint filed on Friday in federal court in Los Angeles. The lawsuit demands a recall of all Samsung DVD players that allow copy-protection features to be disabled. Piracy cost the movie industry about US$5.4 billion in sales last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The other studios bringing the lawsuit are Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios.
■ Shipping
Evergreen lifts profit target
Evergreen Group (長榮集團) is targeting a record NT$15 billion (US$463 million) pre-tax profit this year, the Chinese-language newspaper Commercial Times reported, citing company president Arnold Wang (王龍雄). The company raised shipment charges by more than US$100 per container from April and may raise them further in May should demand remain strong, the newspaper reported. Wang's comments are aimed at rebuffing a Morgan Stanley report saying it cut its recommendation and earning estimates for four Asia-based shipping lines including Evergreen, citing a decline in the fee for moving sea freight, the newspaper said.
■ Marketing
TAITRA to throw light on EU
The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) will invite experts with marketing experience in Europe to a seminar on Feb. 21 to help Taiwanese enterprises better understand European markets and the possible challenges, a TAITRA official said yesterday. As the EU's directives on the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (ROHS) will come into force on July 1, TAITRA will also invite an adviser from the Electric-Electronic and Environmental Technology Development Association and representatives of the French Geodis Group, which ranks among the top five European transport and logistic firms, to offer advice to local firms on how to comply with the ROHS directives and to boost their competitiveness.
■ Credit
Co-ops' loan ratio drops
The overdue loan ratio of the 278 credit cooperatives operated by farmers' and fishermen's associations nationwide declined to 10.92 percent as of the end of December last year, according to tallies released yesterday by the Council of Agriculture. The ratio was 0.94 percentage points lower than that registered at the end of the previous month and 3.54 percentage points lower than that of the same time the previous year, the tallies show. The overdue loans amounted to NT$65 billion (US$2 billion) as of the end of December last year, down NT$4.9 billion over the same time in 2004. As of the end of December, the assets of the credit cooperatives amounted to NT$1.57 trillion, down NT$5.4 billion over November last year. The net asset value amounted to NT$82.3 billion, down NT$2.8 billion from November. The deposit balance totaled NT$1.36 trillion, up NT$10.7 billion from the previous month, while the loan balance totalled NT$594.9 billion, up NT$5.9 billion from the previous month.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
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