US-based Forbes magazine rated Taiwan’s business conditions as the 26th-best worldwide this year, maintaining the same ranking it received last year.
The latest “Best Countries for Business” report, seen online yesterday, describes Taiwan as a “dynamic capitalist economy with gradually decreasing guidance of investment and foreign trade by the authorities.”
The report, the fourth of its kind released by the magazine, said Taiwan ran a large trade surplus and that its foreign reserves were among the world’s largest.
However, the recently inaugurated direct air, shipping and travel links with China were likely to increase Taiwan’s economic interdependence on China, the report said.
Among the 11 indicators used by the magazine in assessing business conditions, Taiwan performed best in terms of innovation, ranking seventh worldwide, followed by technology at 15th and monetary freedom at 16th.
Taiwan’s market performance is rated 27th, property rights 28th and investor protection 30th. It ranks 32nd in terms of both corruption and personal freedom. The country was ranked 39th in terms of trade freedom, 66th in terms of its tax burden and 101st for bureaucratic red tape.
A total of 127 economies are compared and evaluated in the annual report.
The top 10 countries this year are Denmark, the US, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden, Australia, Hong Kong and Norway, in that order.
Among these countries, New Zealand, Australia and Norway are new to the top 10, with Finland, Ireland and Switzerland falling off the top 10 list.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS