TEA
New packaging unveiled
Tea providers in Nantou County’s Lugu Township (鹿谷) unveiled new packaging for their home-grown “dongding” oolong tea on Saturday that they hope will prevent Chinese customers from buying tea that is incorrectly promoted as made in Taiwan. The Lugu Township Dongding Manufacturers Association has been selling its tea to China since 1998. The real dongding tea costs about 300 yuan per 600g, while a fake product goes for about half the price, the association said.
TECHNOLOGY
4G users to increase: study
The population of people using 4G long-term evolution (LTE) high-speed wireless communication service users will soar this year, Digitimes Reserach said in a research note on Wednesday last week. There were 97 countries deploying 263 LTE commercial networks that served about 200 million users worldwide last year, but the number of LTE users globally will top 335 million this year, Digitimes Research analyst Wu Po-hsuan (吳伯軒) said in the note. The increase comes as China and the US have been speeding up their LTE network infrastructure, while Europe and emerging markets are also working to provide high-speed wireless Internet service, Wu said.
AUTOMAKERS
Firm eyes electric scooters
China Motor Co (中華汽車) sees great potential in the European electric scooter market and wants to grab a bigger market share there by 2018. About 10,000 electric scooters are sold annually in Europe at present, the Taoyuan-based company said on Wednesday last week, adding that it is hoping to gain a 7.5 percent of the European market within the next four years.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure
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