Samsung Electronics Co plans to build a US$670 million plant to make mobile phone handsets in northern Vietnam, a Vietnamese official said yesterday.
The world's second largest handset maker has been pushing for the Vietnam plant for nearly a year and submitted the proposal to authorities in Bac Ninh Province earlier last month, said Nguyen Quang Thanh of the provincial planning and investment department.
"They still lack some papers," Thanh said. "Once they fill in all necessary papers, we will grant the investment license right away."
RAMPING UP
The plant will produce 30 million mobile phone handsets a year in the first stage and will gradually expand to produce 100 million units, he said. Bac Ninh is 30km northeast of Hanoi.
Samsung executives in Hanoi were not available for comment yesterday. But officials from the South Korean company had earlier said that they were considering Vietnam for its cheap labor.
In addition to Samsung's domestic handset plant at Gumi, some 260km southeast of Seoul, Samsung also has handset facilities in China, India and Brazil.
DRAWING INVESTORS
Vietnam is the 6th most attractive place for foreign investors behind China, India, Russia, the US and Brazil, said Phan Huu Thang, director of the Foreign Investment Department, quoting the 2007 World Investment Report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
Pledges for foreign investment in Vietnam surged nearly 70 percent last year to a record US$20.3 billion.
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
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday said it would work with US chipmaker Intel Corp to jointly develop and deploy next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and intelligent computing platforms in a move to capture booming demand for AI computing systems. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康), said in a statement that the partnership would combine its global manufacturing scale, system integration expertise and AI data center deployment capabilities with Intel’s strengths in processor architecture, silicon technologies and software ecosystem. The companies said they plan to work on equipment used in AI data centers, including server racks powered by
RSS