Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) plans to resume operations next month by offering three flights from Taiwan to Macau each week and one weekly flight to Penang, Malaysia, citing easing conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The airline, which on Jan. 23 began operations by providing daily flights from Taiwan to Macau, Penang and Da Nang, Vietnam, canceled most of its flights in February and suspended operations completely in the middle of March as the novel coronavirus spread.
“As the pandemic has been gradually contained in Taiwan, we decided to reopen [services] phase by phase, starting with a few flights and likely increasing the scale based on the market situation,” Starlux general manager Glenn Chai (翟健華) told reporters in Taipei yesterday.
From June 1, Starlux is to offer three round-trip flights from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to Macau International Airport each on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday, instead of its original schedule of three daily flights, Chai said.
It would also operate one round-trip flight from Taoyuan to Penang International Airport every Thursday, Chai said.
The airline expects businesspeople or officials attending public affairs conferences to be its first passengers, as they might still need to travel by air, Starlux spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
“Da Nang was not in the picture when we considered resumption, as most passengers to the city were tourists. We do not think that Taiwanese tourists are ready to travel overseas again, as the outbreak has not ended,” Nieh said.
Travelers to Macau and Penang would still need to undergo a 14-day quarantine after returning to Taiwan, as the Central Epidemic Command Center’s travel advisories for those two cities remains at a level 3 “warning,” he added.
The airline yesterday reopened its Web site to allow customers to buy tickets.
Starlux, which operates three narrow-body Airbus SE A321neo jets, said that it would cancel the middle seats in each row for the sake of social distancing, reducing the number of economy-class seats per aircraft from 188 to 127.
“The reduction in seats is unlikely to curb our revenue, as there would be a slim chance of full capacity based even on our most optimistic scenario,” Nieh said.
Starlux said that it is retaining its original plan of launching operations to new destinations — two second-tier cities in Southeast Asia and Japan — in the third and fourth quarters respectively.
Its goal of receiving another nine new A321neo aircraft next year remains unchanged, the airline said.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS