New Industrial Development Bureau (IDB, 工業局) Director-General Shen Jung-chin (沈榮津) yesterday vowed to reshape and upgrade Taiwan’s industry and create more job opportunities.
Shen, who was formerly the head of the Export Processing Zone Administration, succeeds Woody Duh (杜紫軍) at a time when the gloomy international economic situation, including the eurozone debt crisis and China’s import contraction, has impacted Taiwanese companies.
Export orders — an indicator of exports over the next three months — declined 3.52 percent year-on-year to US$36.09 billion in April and the figures for last month are expected to continue declining year-on-year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on May 21.
“How to enhance all the industries in the country and ramp up the engines of manufacturing and service is the crucial role that the Industrial Development Bureau has to play,” Shen said.
The bureau would push for more integration of the manufacturing and services industries, as well as “push for more technology-enabled service industry and more internationalization of the service industry, and differentiating traditional industries,” Shen said.
“The country needs to take advantage of its advanced ICT [information and communication technology] industry to upgrade its industrial structure, and promote the transformation of regional industry,” he said.
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Huawei Technologies Co’s (華為) latest smartphones carry a version of the advanced made-in-China processor it revealed last year, results from an independent analysis showed. This underscored the Chinese company’s ability to sustain production of the controversial chip. The Pura 70 series unveiled last week sports the Kirin 9010 processor, research firm TechInsights found during a teardown of the device. This is a newer version of the Kirin 9000s, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) for the Mate 60 Pro, which had alarmed officials in Washington who thought a 7-nanometer chip was beyond China’s capabilities. Huawei has enjoyed a resurgence since
IMPROVEMENT EXPECTED: The company holds a cautiously optimistic view about this year, an official said, adding that an increase in wafer shipments is predicted United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) yesterday reported its weakest quarterly net profit in three years, which it attributed to a prolonged inventory correction. However, the company said it expects wafer shipments to grow about 3 percent this quarter as demand from communication and computer segments is to pick up from last quarter. Net profit plunged 35.4 percent to NT$10.46 billion (US$321.6 million) in the first quarter of the year, compared with NT$16.18 billion a year earlier, making it the worst quarterly performance since the first quarter of 2021. On a quarterly basis, net profit declined 20.8 percent from NT$13.2 billion, the Hsinchu-based