The government is assessing the feasibility of renewing an economic cooperation agreement with Indonesia to foster bilateral trade and investment, as part of efforts to push the New Southbound Policy, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
A feasibility assessment, which began at the end of last year, is expected to be completed later this year, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) said before the opening ceremony of the Taiwan Expo in Jakarta.
“An assessment was finished in 2012, but things have changed [over the past few years]. We have to take into account the present situation,” Wang told reporters.
The government plans to renew a bilateral investment agreement with Indonesia aimed at protecting investment in each other’s territory.
Taiwanese companies last year invested a total of US$397 million in Indonesia, a 166 percent jump from US$149 million in 2016, government data showed.
The ministry said it is to begin studying the details of a renewal after it acquires an English-language bilateral investment agreement template drafted by the Indonesian government, but did not provide a timetable.
Renewal of the agreement with Indonesia would mark another step in Taiwan’s strengthening of economic ties with Southeast Asian nations, after a bilateral investment agreement with the Philippines was renewed in December last year.
The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) yesterday opened the Taiwan Expo in Jakarta, with the aim of helping Taiwanese firms explore “southbound” opportunities in the world’s fourth-largest country by population.
The government-backed trade promotion agency last year launched the Taiwan Expo project, which targets markets including Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.
“We held our first-ever Taiwan Expo in Southeast Asia here [Jakarta] last year and that was a big success,” TAITRA chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said, adding that the matchmaking event generated US$49.25 million in orders.
For this year’s exhibition, TAITRA invited 230 Taiwanese companies from 10 industries, including machinery, home appliances, cosmetics and food and beverage.
TAITRA has also set up new pavilions for digital commerce and bubble tea, in a bid to expand Taiwan’s presence in Indonesian markets.
Taiwan, whose e-commerce market reached US$34.2 billion in sales last year, is likely to duplicate its success in Indonesia, TAITRA said.
The business-to-business Taiwan Expo runs until tomorrow at the Jakarta Convention Center, showcasing more than 4,500 products and services provided by Taiwanese firms.
The three-day event is expected to attract more visitors than last year’s 18,188 people, TAITRA said.
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
RSS