Wan Hai Lines Ltd (萬海航運) has purchased 50,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit containers from China International Marine Containers Ltd (CIMC, 中國國際海運集裝箱) at a cost of US$141.73 million amid a global container shortage, the company said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Monday.
The average price of the containers would be US$2,835 per unit, Wan Hai said.
The company expects to receive the containers from the second quarter onward, Wan Hai spokeswoman Laura Su (蘇麗梅) told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday.
Photo courtesy of Wan Hai Lines Ltd
Most of the new containers would be 40-foot high-cube containers, one of the most commonly used containers for ocean freight, Su said.
“It is difficult to predict when the container shortage would end, although some people expect the shortage to end after the Lunar New Year holiday,” Su said. “We hope to resolve the issue as early as possible with the purchase of new containers.”
The shortage was caused by many containers piling up at ports or being “in the wrong places,” due to congested seaports and reduced personnel amid COVID-19 lockdowns worldwide, Su said.
Therefore, containers have been taking longer returning to their places of origin, which disrupted the logistics chain and caused concerns for Wan Hai’s customers, she said.
The purchase is not a particularly big order for Wan Hai, as the shipper buys new containers with a similar combined capacity every year, Su said.
However, it came earlier than expected, as Wan Hai had bought 37,000 containers in October last year from CIMC for US$109 million, she said, adding that the company has begun taking delivery of some of those containers.
The average age of Wan Hai’s containers is 4.3 years, lower than the global average of 6.6, she said.
The shortage has driven up sea freight rates, which boosted Wan Hai’s revenue last quarter to a record NT$11.6 billion (US$408.31 million), up 75 percent year-on-year.
Wan Hai has a rosy outlook for its orders leading to the Lunar New Year holiday, but the post-holiday outlook remains unclear, Su said.
Wan Hai owned 66 ships and was chartering 39 ships as of Sept. 1 last year.
Intra-Asian routes contributed 70 percent to its total revenue, followed by Middle Eastern and Indian routes with 20.6 percent. The US and South American routes accounted for 5.6 percent and 6.6 percent respectively, company data showed.
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
Three years after Luxembourg declared all public transport free in a bid to clear its roads of jams and cut pollution, the car is still king of the congested grand duchy. Traffic permitting, it is barely an hour’s drive from Weiswampach in the far north of Luxembourg near the German and Belgian borders to Dudelange in the south, next door to France. The wealthy country of just 650,000 people appeared the perfect place for a bold experiment — making public transport on trains, trams and buses free nationwide. However, Luxembourg, despite its lack of long-distance highways, has one of the highest rates