EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) yesterday partially resumed passenger flights to Bangkok, with China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) planning to do the same next month as Thailand begins to lift its travel restrictions.
EVA and CAL, Taiwan’s two largest carriers, have continued to operate flights between Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok during the COVID-19 pandemic, although they have not entirely been passenger flights.
As the Thai government banned the entry of international tourists from April, flights from Taipei to Bangkok operated by the two carriers have only contained cargo, while passengers in Bangkok could board flights returning to Taipei.
Photo: Cheng I-hwa, Bloomberg
Now that Thailand has begun to ease its travel restrictions, EVA yesterday began to resume two round-trip flights per week between Taipei and Bangkok, while CAL plans to operate eight such flights next month and nine such flights in December, the two airlines said.
The airlines have not set a fixed schedule for the flights, as their times and dates would be adjusted depending on the pandemic situation, they said.
Thailand allows entry to its citizens and residents, although a measure introduced early this month allows foreign nationals from countries deemed to be low-risk to apply to travel to Thailand under a “Special Tourist Visa.”
Separately, Japan’s ANA Holdings Inc plans to cut about 3,500 jobs by fiscal year 2022, and temporarily transfer employees to Toyota Motor Corp and other automakers, Yomiuri Shimbun reported, without saying where it got the information.
The Japanese carrier would announce a business plan tomorrow that includes the cutbacks and a halt to hiring to slash labor costs, which account for about 30 percent of the company’s fixed expenses, the newspaper reported.
The global airline industry is facing a painfully slow recovery from the effects of the pandemic.
ANA is expecting a record full-year loss of about ¥530 billion (US$5.06 billion), the Kyodo news agency reported earlier.
The company plans to acquire about US$3.8 billion in subordinated loans from five lenders.
ANA would sell about 30 wide-body aircraft because of their low fuel efficiency and high maintenance costs, the Yomiuri reported.
It would also utilize its customer data to offer financial and other services, while arranging code-sharing with its budget carrier, Peach Aviation Ltd, the report said.
In fiscal year 2021, the company would cut about ¥80 billion in costs, the paper said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day