Taiwanese PC maker Acer Inc (宏碁) yesterday partnered with Taipei-based AppWorks Ventures (之初創投) in a bid to foster more local technology start-ups.
The partnership also marks Acer’s first step in its “Blue Sky” initiative, which focuses on Internet of Things technology, the hottest topic in tech, to harness the power of the network to connect everyday devices.
Under the collaboration, Acer is to invite innovation teams fostered by AppWorks to present their products and services to Acer’s executives on a quarterly basis, before offering them guidance, marketing or manufacturing resources, said Robert Wang (王定愷), a general manager at the company’s Build Your Own Cloud and tablet business group.
“By using Acer’s resources, we can help start-ups to find upstream component suppliers for their products or take the promising firms to international trade shows,” Wang said at a press conference.
Acer plans to to take six local start-ups to the ExA Summit in Berlin next week, Wang said.
The ExA Summit is a forum for “tech-culture” discussion by Taiwanese and German technology firms. Acer founder Stan Shih (施振榮) also plans to attend the forum, Wang said.
In addition, the company plans to team up with semiconductor companies such as MediaTek Inc (聯發科) and Intel Corp, as well as contract computer makers such as Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) and Wistron Corp (緯創), to enable developer teams to produce their products more quickly using advanced components, Wang said.
In related news, Wistron, a spin-off from Acer, yesterday reported 19.72 percent annual growth in sales to NT$150.62 billion (US$4.82 billion) last quarter.
Last quarter’s figure was 13.69 percent lower than the NT$174.52 billion sales posted the previous quarter.
The result met Wistron chairman Simon Lin’s (林憲明) guidance in February, when he said the first quarter of this year would see year-on-year growth on the back of improved management.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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