Footwear maker Pou Chen Corp (寶成工業) yesterday said that it has suspended production at its plant in Myanmar amid clashes between police and protesters following a military coup on Feb. 1, in which the military deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Pou Chen provides original design manufacturing services to international brands, such as Nike Inc, Adidas AG, Asics Corp, New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc, Timberland Co and Salomon SAS.
The company said that the decision to stop production was made out of safety considerations.
Photo: EPA-EFE/STR
The suspension is not expected to have an adverse effect on Pou Chen’s overall operations, as the Burmese plant accounts for a fraction of its total production, the company said.
Its factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar account for about 4 percent of the firm’s total production, Pou Chen said, adding that the closure of the Burmese manufacturing facility would not cause any delays in shipments to customers.
If greater capacity is needed to meet demand, production would be increased at its plants in Indonesia and Vietnam to fill the void left by the Burmese plant, the company said.
Pou Chen’s business has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with revenue from its shoe contracting business falling 24.6 percent last year from a year earlier.
Tsang Yi Co (昌億), another Taiwanese footwear maker that supplies shoes to Adidas, has also halted its production in Myanmar amid the violence there, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Invest Taiwan office said.
Pou Chen and Tsang Yi suspended their Burmese operations to protect their employees, and it is unclear when production would resume given the turmoil in the country, the office said.
NXP Semiconductors NV expects its first automotive-grade 5-nanometer chip built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to become available for automakers within one-and-a-half years at the earliest, following demand for better computing performance and energy efficiency for connected vehicles, a company executive said yesterday. That would mean a significant upgrade from the 16-nanometer technology NXP adopted in its existing series of microprocessors. NXP chief technology executive Lars Reger made the remarks during a media briefing yesterday in Taipei. The latest updates came after NXP unveiled its plan to source 5-nanometer capacity from TSMC in 2021. This is Reger’s first trip to
EVADING US CONTROLS? ‘These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors,’ a source said about HiSilicon’s components A Huawei Technologies Co (華為) unit is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras in a fresh sign that the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of US export controls, two sources briefed on the unit’s efforts said. The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company’s chip design unit, HiSilicon Technologies Co (海思半導體), started this year, said one of the sources and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said that at least some of the customers were Chinese. Huawei unveiled new smartphones in the past few weeks that
CENTRAL BANK: The consumer price index would grow while core CPI is set to move forward at a milder rate, the governor said, adding that the GDP forecast is down The central bank yesterday kept its policy rate unchanged for the second straight quarter, saying that a rate pause would help support the economy, as consumer prices have moderated and would return to the 2 percent target next year. “The board gave unanimous support to a policy hold, although some members voiced concern over lingering inflationary pressures and called for close monitoring,” central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) told a media briefing after its quarterly board meeting. The consumer price index (CPI) would grow 1.83 percent next year, while core CPI after stripping out volatile items would advance a milder 1.73 percent,
SLUMP: The electronics, machinery and traditional industries posted the largest decline in the past year; overall, sectors showed gains over the previous month Taiwan’s industrial production index decreased 10.53 percent year-on-year to 91.38 last month, falling for a 15th consecutive month on an annual basis, as weak global economic growth continued to weigh on end-market demand and investment momentum, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said on Saturday. The industrial production index gauges output in Taiwan’s four main industries: manufacturing, electricity and gas supply, water supply, and mining and quarrying. Last month’s decline was the smallest contraction since March when the index dropped 16.03 percent from a year earlier. On a monthly basis, the index rose 7.28 percent, marking a second straight month of improvement,
RSS