Chunghwa gets hotline contract
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s biggest telecom operator, has won a contract from the government to set up a dedicated phone line to help expatriates in Taiwan obtain useful information for free.
People working in Taiwan as well as visitors can call the toll-free number 0800-024-111 for a range of information including visas, tax and transportation. The service is available in Mandarin, English and Japanese.
The call center operates around the clock with useful information from different government agencies, a press release said.
The new government service was launched to cope with a rising number of expatriates, the National Immigration Agency said in the press release.
The number of expatriates in the country rose to more than 560,000. With 15,000 coming from Japan, the governance agency began offering Japanese information via the dedicated phone line last month.
The government agency said it has helped more than 35,000 people with their problems in the January to July period.
e-learning sector expanding
Thanks to the government’s five-year “e-learning project,” the nation’s e-learning market could rech NT$25 billion (US$780 million) in sales by 2012, the Council for Economic Planning and Development estimated.
The first stage of the e-learning project was initiated by the council in 2003 and ended last year. The government launched a new five-year plan beginning this year, council officials said.
Thanks to the incentives provided by the project in the initial stage, the number of local companies engaged in e-learning rose from 20 to 200 during the five-year period.
During that same period, the market expanded at a composite annual growth rate of 67 percent, from NT$700 million in 2003 to NT$15 billion last year, the officials said.
Gintech sells stock for Europe
Gintech Energy Corp (昱晶能源), Taiwan’s second-biggest solar-cell maker by market value, is selling between US$160 million and US$170 million in stock that will trade in Europe, the bank managing the sale said.
Taipei-based Gintech is offering 30 million global depositary shares, each one equivalent to one ordinary Taiwan-traded share, according to an e-mail statement sent to clients by UBS AG and obtained by Bloomberg News.
The Swiss bank acts as global coordinator and joint bookrunner of the sale.
TWSE halts Lehman trading
The Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp (TWSE) ordered that Taiwanese operations of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, suspend trading on the local bourse from yesterday.
In a press statement released late on Tuesday, the stock exchange said that the order had been issued in light of the US investment bank’s global business situation.
The firm filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday, throwing financial markets into chaos.
TWSE said that it would consider lifting its trading ban on Lehman Brothers only after the ripples caused by the investment bank’s financial woes have settled.
NT drops against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar lost ground against the US dollar on the Taipei Foreign Exchange yesterday, dropping NT$0.012 to close at NT$32.082.
A total of US$1.29 billion changed hands during the day’s trading.
SPEED OF LIGHT: US lawmakers urged the commerce department to examine the national security threats from China’s development of silicon photonics technology US President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday said it is finalizing rules that would limit US investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology sectors in China that could threaten US national security. The rules, which were proposed in June by the US Department of the Treasury, were directed by an executive order signed by Biden in August last year covering three key sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain AI systems. The rules are to take effect on Jan. 2 next year and would be overseen by the Treasury’s newly created Office of Global Transactions. The Treasury said the “narrow
SPECULATION: The central bank cut the loan-to-value ratio for mortgages on second homes by 10 percent and denied grace periods to prevent a real-estate bubble The central bank’s board members in September agreed to tighten lending terms to induce a soft landing in the housing market, although some raised doubts that they would achieve the intended effect, the meeting’s minutes released yesterday showed. The central bank on Sept. 18 introduced harsher loan restrictions for mortgages across Taiwan in the hope of curbing housing speculation and hoarding that could create a bubble and threaten the financial system’s stability. Toward the aim, it cut the loan-to-value ratio by 10 percent for second and subsequent home mortgages and denied grace periods for first mortgages if applicants already owned other residential
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip assembly and testing manufacturing (ATM) service provider, expects to double its leading-edge advanced technology services revenue next year to more than US$1 billion, benefiting from strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, a company executive said on Thursday. That would be the second year that ASE has doubled its advanced chip packaging and testing technology revenue, following an estimate of more than US$500 million for this year. ASE is one of the major beneficiaries from the AI boom as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is outsourcing production of advanced chip