Tatung eyes China market
The electronics retailing arm under Tatung Co (大同), Tatung Consumer Products Taiwan Co (大同綜合訊電), is set to expand into China this year, Tatung chairman Lin Wei-shan (林蔚山) said yesterday.
Tatung Consumer Products Taiwan Co was aggressively planning to make inroads across the Taiwan Strait, and there could be visible results this year, he said.
On the local front, the retailer currently has 246 outlets nationwide and it plans to add as many as 20 stores.
The retailer has set a revenue target of a 30 percent increase this year to NT$13 billion (US$0.4 billion).
Tatung Consumers Products announced yesterday its latest offering was an electric bicycle model. The company believes people will be more interested in such bicycles because of the growing interest in a greener living environment.
Telecom sets spending level
The nation’s No. 2 telecom operator, Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), said yesterday its landline affiliate Taiwan Fixed Networks Corp (台灣固網) had obtained its board’s approval to budget NT$1.6 billion for capital spending this year.
That represents an increase of about 23 percent from last year’s NT$1.3 billion.
The company would invest in network expansion and upgrades as well as on undersea cables expansion.
The board of Taiwan Fixed also approved a cash dividend of NT$0.94 per share for shareholders. That will cost the company a total of NT$1.98 billion.
Fubon Life premiums grow
Fubon Life Insurance Co (富邦人壽) posted a 24 percent growth year-on-year in first-year premiums to NT$205.7 billion last year, company president Cheng Pen-yuan (鄭本源) told reporters yesterday.
After reporting NT$10.8 billion in net profit for last year, or NT$7.2 per share, the life insurer remains cautious about this year’s prospects, predicting another 5 percent to 6 percent growth in first-year premiums for this year, Cheng said.
The company also plans to add another 3,000 sales agent by the year’s end to its 13,000-staff workforce, he said.
Perfect staff headed for Taiwan
A Chinese direct sales firm is planning to send about 10,000 employees on a trip to Taiwan in June, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
Perfect (China) Co (完美中國), which sells food supplement and skin care products, will use the trip as an incentive for its sales agents, Tourism Bureau chief Wayne Liu (劉喜臨) said.
“Working with enterprises like Perfect has become the key element in our efforts to promote Taiwan tourism to mainland visitors,” Liu said.
Last year, 12,000 employees from Amway China (安利中國) visited Taiwan on a similar incentive tour, generating about NT$700 million in business for the local economy.
The number of Taiwan-bound Chinese tourists reached 972,000 last year, a 195 percent increase over 2008, the bureau said, adding that as many as 1.12 million Chinese tourists may visit this year.
Central bank stresses rules
The central bank has asked banks to follow rules on foreign exchange and currency forwards businesses, it said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
The bank made the comments after meeting all lenders that conducted foreign exchange business earlier in the day to stress the importance of following rules and risk control.
Meanwhile, the New Taiwan dollar advanced by NT$0.010 yesterday to close at NT$31.970 against the US dollar on turnover of US$649 million.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
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