■INVESTMENT
Taiwan mulls policy change
The government is considering classifying China’s qualified domestic institutional investors as foreign investors when setting the limit on stakes they can own in Taiwanese companies, the Chinese-language Commercial Times reported yesterday, citing unnamed sources. Under current regulations, foreign investors are allowed to collectively own, at most, one third of Taiwan’s commercial airlines, or 20 percent to 60 percent of telecommunications companies, the newspaper reported. The Cabinet will meet this week to discuss the ceilings, the newspaper said.
■EXHIBITION VENUES
New center to open in 2014
An exhibition and convention center in Kaohsiung is slated to begin operations in 2014 at the latest on the back of an increased budget, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Sheng-chung (林聖忠) said on Friday. Wang Chang-hua (汪璋華), head of the Kaohsiung office of the Bureau of Foreign Trade under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said the budget for building the planned Kaohsiung world trade center has been increased to NT$3.68 billion (US$113.2 million) to cope with the rising price of construction materials, up from the previous NT$3 billion.
■AUTOMOBILES
Toyota denies plant report
Toyota Motor Corp said it hasn’t decided to resume building plants in Mississippi and China, after a Japanese newspaper report said the automaker intends to restart suspended construction. Toyota will restart work on a factory in Blue Springs, Mississippi, with a target of opening it by March 31, 2011, the Nikkei newspaper said yesterday, without saying where it got the information. The automaker will also lift its suspension of construction on a plant with China FAW Group Corp (中國第一汽車集團) in Changchun, Jilin Province, the newspaper said.
■CONFECTIONERY
Hershey contacts Cadbury
Hershey Co, exploring its options for a possible bid for Cadbury Plc, has been in contact with Nestle SA, two people familiar with the talks said. An agreement between Hershey and Nestle may not be reached, and Hershey would prefer to bid alone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. Any offer would challenge an unsolicited £10.2 billion (US$17 billion) bid from Kraft Foods Inc.
■BANKING
Regulators close AmTrust
US regulators on Friday shut down Ohio’s AmTrust Bank, the fourth-largest US bank to fail this year. They also closed five others, bringing to 130 the number of US banks to be brought down so far this year by recession and mountains of bad debt. The 130 bank failures are the most in a year since 1992 at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. They have cost the federal deposit insurance fund more than US$28 billion so far this year. They compare with 25 last year and three in 2007.
■INTERNET
Google goes multilingual
Google has quietly rolled out an online dictionary offering the meanings of words in more than two dozen languages. A visit on Friday to a Google Dictionary service at google.com/dictionary showed a clean, simple Web page with a box for selecting languages from a drop-down list and a second box for typing in words to be defined. The dictionary service offered definitions of words in 28 languages and to translate terms from or into English.
‘DECENT RESULTS’: The company said it is confident thanks to an improving world economy and uptakes in new wireless and AI technologies, despite US uncertainty Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it plans to build a new server manufacturing factory in the US this year to address US President Donald Trump’s new tariff policy. That would be the second server production base for Pegatron in addition to the existing facilities in Taoyuan, the iPhone assembler said. Servers are one of the new businesses Pegatron has explored in recent years to develop a more balanced product lineup. “We aim to provide our services from a location in the vicinity of our customers,” Pegatron president and chief executive officer Gary Cheng (鄭光治) told an online earnings conference yesterday. “We
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The battle for artificial intelligence supremacy hinges on microchips, but the semiconductor sector that produces them has a dirty secret: It is a major source of chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems. Global chip sales surged more than 19 percent to about US$628 billion last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, which forecasts double-digit growth again this year. That is adding urgency to reducing the effects of “forever chemicals” — which are also used to make firefighting foam, nonstick pans, raincoats and other everyday items — as are regulators in the US and Europe who are beginning to
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