DHL Express Taiwan Corp (洋基通運) yesterday announced that it would start a trial of cargo bicycle deliveries in an industrial park, making Taiwan the first nation in the Asia-Pacific region to adopt the eco-friendly delivery method.
The firm, a local subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL Group, one of the world’s leading mail and logistics services groups, said that starting next month, it would use a “cubicycle” for deliveries at Tai Yuen Hi-Tech Industrial Park (台元科技園區) in Hsinchu County’s Jhubei City (竹北).
As the company has set up a logistics center inside the park, it would be hassle-free for workers to ride the special vehicle to deliver goods or mail to clients, DHL Express Taiwan said.
Photo: Kao Shih-ching, Taipei Times
The company is to use one cubicycle during the trial, which is expected to last from three to six months, to test delivery efficiency and staff reactions, DHL Express Taiwan managing director Yung C. Ooi (黃湧君) told a news conference in Taipei.
“If the trial is successful, we plan to import more cubicycles into Taiwan and adopt them for first and last-mile delivery,” Ooi said.
The firm would first expand the green logistics service to the nation’s other industrial parks, as traffic is usually better and safer there, but would try to adopt the bicycles on regular streets if approved by the government, Ooi said.
Unlike regular bicycles, a cubicycle has four wheels, resembles a recumbent bicycle and is equipped with a customized trailer that can carry one container with a load of up to 125kg, engineering and infrastructure department manager Monson Chou (周鄭義) said.
As cubicycles are equipped with two batteries that deliver up to 250 watts of power to electric motors, delivery personnel will not feel too tired when riding, and it has maximum mileage of about 50km per day, Chou said.
The vehicle was imported from Europe, but many of its components were made by Taiwanese companies, so it would be easy for DHL Express Taiwan to maintain the bike, Chou said.
The group, which has been using cubicycles for deliveries in Europe for many years, chose Taiwan as the first Asian-Pacific nation to launch the service, as it is known as the “kingdom of bicycles” and has a bicycle-friendly environment, he said.
The firm last year announced plans to reduce all logistics-related emissions to net zero by 2050 and purchased 15 Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) electric scooters, as well as hybrid vehicles, saying the green vehicles should reduce carbon emissions by about 50 percent from 2017.
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
MOUNTING PRESSURE: Although bank failures in the US and Europe would not cause systemic risks, it would dampen consumers’ willingness to spend, GlobalWafers said GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s third-largest silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that the financial turmoil in the US and Europe has dimmed the outlook for chip demand in the second half of this year, as growing economic uncertainty could dampen consumer spending. The Hsinchu-based wafer manufacturer said it is seeing greater pressure from economic uncertainty on the industry’s recovery, as customers would have not expected Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and a tier-one bank like Credit Suisse Group SA to collapse suddenly. Although the failures are unlikely to cause systemic risks, consumers would be cautious of spending on non-essential items, such
RSS