The nation’s car rental industry has experienced a steep drop in business as people cancel travel plans and stay at home following a surge in local COVID-19 infections last month.
The slump in business is particularly damaging for some car rental firms and might push them into bankruptcy, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) reported yesterday, citing the Taipei Passenger Car Rental Association.
The association has called on the government to suspend vehicle fuel tax and vehicle license tax this year to help car rental companies overcome the difficulties, the newspaper reported.
Photo courtesy of Carplus Auto Leasing Co
The government last year halved the vehicle fuel and license taxes for car rental companies as part of its COVID-19 relief measures, the association said.
However, despite the situation this year being more severe than last year, the government’s latest “Stimulus 4.0” COVID-19 relief package contains no measures for the industry, leaving companies in a more miserable state, the association added.
Carplus Auto Leasing Corp (格上租車), a unit of Yulon Group (裕隆集團), has seen revenue from its short-term car rental and chauffeur service drop by nearly 70 percent, the Liberty Times reported.
The company’s rental business has been in the red since May 15, when the level 3 COVID-19 alert was first issued in Taipei and New Taipei City, it said.
Hotai Leasing Corp (和運租車), a subsidiary of Hotai Motor Co (和泰汽車), also experienced a collapse in rental bookings, the paper reported.
Hotai Leasing, whose iRent mobile app allows customers to make reservations, collect and return rental cars at different locations any time, said more than 4,000 of its vehicles are in parking lots and roadside parking spaces, while about 2,000 vehicles have been left idle at its local outlets, as people avoid travel, the newspaper reported.
The association urged the government to include the car rental business in its relief package and provide other aid options, such as subsidizing up to 40 percent of workers’ salaries for rental business and issuing a subsidy of NT$10,000 per month per chauffeur for three months.
The government could also help rental firms negotiate auto loan extensions with banks and offer them full-interest subsidies during the extension period, the association said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by