Taiwan’s technology industrial parks (TIP), formerly known as export processing zones, posted a record-breaking performance in the first half of this year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“Despite the COVID-19 outbreak, work went on at our TIPs,” Export Processing Zone Administration (EPZA) Deputy Director-General Liu Chi-chuan (劉繼傳) said.
For the first half of the year, revenue at the 10 parks hit a record NT$216.1 billion (US$7.74 billion), while aggregate foreign trade totaled a record US$12.7 billion, the ministry said.
“We saw increased investment, revenue, exports, imports and the number of employees in the first half of the year,” Liu said. “Even after the COVID-19 outbreak that started in May, we kept gaining ground.”
The 10 parks employ 84,822 workers.
As Taiwan moved to tame the outbreak, the pace in investment and production activities at the 10 parks across the nation “slowed, but never ceased,” he added.
“Unlike other countries that were hit by COVID-19, the situation was never serious enough for work to cease in Taiwan,” Liu said, adding that it was a vote of confidence by businesses that the government would keep COVID-19 under control.
The strong showing in the first half reflected the robust global demand for products and services provided by the TIPs, including semiconductor packaging and testing, display device manufacturing, optical and electronic manufacturing, and digital content creation, Liu said.
“Thanks to the EU and the US waking up economically after lockdown, we expect the parks to become even busier,” he said.
A TIP in Taichung focusing on software industry, Taichung Software Park (台中軟體園區), saw revenue expand 26 percent year-on-year in the first half of this year, while Tanzi Technology Industrial Park (潭子科技產業園區) in the same city, which focuses on optical lens production, grew 31 percent, Liu said.
The TIP that posted the steepest growth was Pingtung Technology Industrial Park (屏東科技產業園區) in Pingtung County, which saw investment rise 273 percent, revenue grow 38 percent and employee headcount increase 17 percent in the first half of the year, he added.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
RSS