Yageo Corp (國巨) yesterday announced that it has signed a deal to invest 205 million euros (US$224.9 million) in North Macedonia over the next 10 years.
The company, which supplies passive components, such as chip resistors, inductors, tantalum capacitors and multi-layer ceramic capacitors, said that it would build plants in the Technological Industrial Development Zones (TIDZs) in the capital, Skopje, and the city of Stip in the country’s east.
Yageo made the announcement after a company representative and Jovan Despotovski, general manager at the Directorate for Technological Industrial Development Zones, signed an investment agreement at the company’s headquarters in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店).
Photo: Chang Hui-wen, Taipei Times
The two sides have been in talks over the past year, Despotovski said.
North Macedonian Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski attended the signing ceremony via videolink, the statement said.
“I would like to express my sincere welcome and respect to Yageo, a global high-tech company, to have such meaningful investment in North Macedonia. It’s [the investment] confirmation of the good economic policies that we are leading and the stable investment climate that we are creating in the country,” Kovacevski said.
Yageo said its investment is the biggest “greenfield investment” in the country since independence.
A greenfield investment means the company would build operations from the ground up, from searching for a plot to the construction of plants and other facilities, Yageo said.
The investment is expected to create more than 3,900 jobs in the Skopje and Stip TIDZs, it added.
Yageo subsidiary Kemet Corp operates two plants, and one research and development center in North Macedonia, mainly producing capacitors for electric vehicles, the company said.
“With a strategic geographical position, a stable monetary and favorable tax environment, and highly qualified workforce with competitive labor costs, North Macedonia is an ideal location for Yageo to expand its business in Europe,” Yageo chairman Pierre Chen (陳泰銘) said in the statement.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS