The government should prioritize relaxation of cross-strait controls to help facilitate the nation's much-desired Taiwan-US free trade agreement (FTA), even though there is little chance of realization in the foreseeable future, the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham) said yesterday.
Taiwan should attend to various things that will make a bilateral trade pact more compelling, and on the top of the list is an improvement in the cross-strait environment, AmCham said in a report published in this month's issue of its Taiwan Business Topics magazine.
"US companies will have far more of a reason to participate in the Taiwanese economy if there are full trade, travel and investment connections to China," AmCham said.
With China's rapid development as both a production center and a consumer market, links to China must be now viewed as essential links to the world economy, the chamber added.
Taiwan has been promoting a Taiwan-US FTA for years and Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Steve Chen (
But, the outlook does not look promising as the chamber said that: "Taiwan tends to be off the radarscope these days for most-high-level US officials," who are preoccupied with crises in areas like Iraq, Israel and North Korea, and the challenges and opportunities presented by China's rise.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
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