PHARMACEUTICALS
Eye-drug patent approved
Taiwan Liposome Co (台灣微脂體), a developer of generic drugs used to treat breast and ovarian cancer, on Friday said that the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office has approved its patent for a ophthalmic drug delivery system containing phospholipid and cholesterol. The company said in a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing that it has received patent protection for up to 20 years. The announcement came after the company secured the patent for prolonging drug lifetime in the eyes in the US and New Zealand in 2014 as well as from China and Japan last year. Taiwan Liposome has also filed ophthalmic drug delivery patent applications with authorities in Europe and Australia. Applications of the patent include the company’s new drug Prodex, the company said.
BANKING
Bad loans show uptick
The latest statistics compiled by the Financial Supervisory Commission showed a slight uptick in non-performing loans (NPL) made by Taiwanese banks in China, with total bad debts amounting to NT$365 million (US$11.04 million) as of the end of November last year. The commission’s data, released on Thursday, showed that the Bank of Taiwan (臺灣銀行) added bad debts of NT$36 million in November, following bad debts of NT$52 million incurred by the Land Bank of Taiwan (土地銀行) in October and the NT$277 million NPL racked up by Taiwan Cooperative Financial Holding Co (合庫金控) in 2014. Taiwanese banks reported total profits of NT$297.2 billion in the first 11 months of last year, down 2.5 percent from a year ago, driven by earnings declines of 23 percent at their Chinese branches and 11 percent at offshore banking units, the data showed.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
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