Even though Sony Corp has shut down six plants in northeastern Japan after Friday’s earthquake and tsunami, supplies of digital camera and image sensor components will remain stable, the Taiwan unit of the Tokyo-based company said yesterday.
The six suspended plants in Miyagi Prefecture and Fukushima Prefecture do not produce components for digital cameras, nor do they make charge-coupled devices, a high-speed semiconductor used chiefly in image detection, said Sophie Tsai (蔡宜凌), a spokeswoman for Sony Taiwan.
Taiwan can rest assured that supplies of digital camera and image sensor parts will remain stable, Tsai said.
Among the six quake-hit factories, the four located in Miyagi Prefecture produce mainly IC cards, Blu-ray discs and magnetic tape, while two other factories in Fukushima Prefecture make lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
The Blu-ray disc and magnetic tape factory in Tagajo City, Miyagi Prefecture, suffered the worst damage. The ground floor of the entire building is still flooded and Sony officials do not foresee the factory becoming operational in the short term.
Meanwhile, production lines at the Japanese optical disk maker Taiyo Yuden Co Ltd in Fukushima Prefecture have also been shut down because of the earthquake, the Japan Recording--Media Industries Association said earlier yesterday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day