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.
The number of Taiwanese working in the US rose to a record high of 137,000 last year, driven largely by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) rapid overseas expansion, according to government data released yesterday. A total of 666,000 Taiwanese nationals were employed abroad last year, an increase of 45,000 from 2023 and the highest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) showed. Overseas employment had steadily increased between 2009 and 2019, peaking at 739,000, before plunging to 319,000 in 2021 amid US-China trade tensions, global supply chain shifts, reshoring by Taiwanese companies and
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) received about NT$147 billion (US$4.71 billion) in subsidies from the US, Japanese, German and Chinese governments over the past two years for its global expansion. Financial data compiled by the world’s largest contract chipmaker showed the company secured NT$4.77 billion in subsidies from the governments in the third quarter, bringing the total for the first three quarters of the year to about NT$71.9 billion. Along with the NT$75.16 billion in financial aid TSMC received last year, the chipmaker obtained NT$147 billion in subsidies in almost two years, the data showed. The subsidies received by its subsidiaries —
Shiina Ito has had fewer Chinese customers at her Tokyo jewelry shop since Beijing issued a travel warning in the wake of a diplomatic spat, but she said she was not concerned. A souring of Tokyo-Beijing relations this month, following remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi about Taiwan, has fueled concerns about the impact on the ritzy boutiques, noodle joints and hotels where holidaymakers spend their cash. However, businesses in Tokyo largely shrugged off any anxiety. “Since there are fewer Chinese customers, it’s become a bit easier for Japanese shoppers to visit, so our sales haven’t really dropped,” Ito
OUTLOOK: Pat Gelsinger said he did not expect the heavy AI infrastructure investments by the major cloud service providers to cause an AI bubble to burst soon Building a resilient energy supply chain is crucial for Taiwan to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology and grow its economy, former Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger said yesterday. Gelsinger, now a general partner at the US venture capital firm Playground Global LLC, was asked at a news conference in Taipei about his views on Taiwan’s hardware development and growing concern over an AI bubble. “Today, the greatest issue in Taiwan isn’t even in the software or in architecture. It is energy,” Gelsinger said. “You are not in the position to have a resilient energy supply chain, and that,
RSS