The Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said yesterday it helped a domestic firm to secure bank loans and set up the first plant devoted to making solar power products and systems on the outlying island of Kinmen.
The council said it had approved the application from SolarGate Technology Corp (茂鑫能源公司) to obtain bank loans of NT$25.5 million (US$830,6000) to build a production line in Jinsha Township (金沙) of Kinmen County.
Liang Wai-wei (梁海威), senior specialist at the CEPD’s department of financial analysis, said SolarGate plans to invest over NT$400 million (US$1.3 million) in building the production line and ship its products to China through small three links services.
The investment project is expected to create 150 jobs for the remote county and help boost its economic development, Liang said, adding that SolarGate acquired the loan from First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) at the end of last month with an interest rate of 4.225 percent.
SolarGate, established in August 2003 with capitalization of NT$80 million, is eyeing the solar energy market across the Taiwan Strait, Liang said.
“That explained why the company chose to build the production line in Kinmen,” as the county is geographically much closer to China’s Fujian Province than to Taiwan proper, Liang said.
The company said on its Web site that it is capable of serving all customized requests for solar power products and systems, including stand-alone systems, grid tied systems and total solutions for a variety of applications.
The council expressed hope that SolarGate’s investment plan would bring high-tech development to the county, which has a population of 50,000.
A former military preserve, Kinmen was returned to the civilian government in the mid-1990s and travel to and from Taiwan was reopened.
Direct travel between Kinmen and China was opened in 2002 and there has been extensive tourism development on the island in anticipation of Chinese tourists.
Liang said the loan fell in line with the government’s effort to promote economic development in the outlying island groups of Kinmen, Penghu and Matsu.
To that end, the council has encouraged investors to take advantage of its offshore construction fund that set aside NT$1.5 billion for preferential loans and another NT$4 billion for credit loans this year.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNCERTAINTIES: Exports surged 34.1% and private investment grew 7.03% to outpace expectations in the first half, although US tariffs could stall momentum The Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast to 3.05 percent this year on a robust first-half performance, but warned that US tariff threats and external uncertainty could stall momentum in the second half of the year. “The first half proved exceptionally strong, allowing room for optimism,” CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “But the growth momentum may slow moving forward due to US tariffs.” The tariff threat poses definite downside risks, although the scale of the impact remains unclear given the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s policies, Lien said. Despite the headwinds, Taiwan is likely
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of
RSS