E-commerce site Taobao Taiwan (淘寶台灣) yesterday announced that it would leave the Taiwanese market at the end of this year, after being told by the Investment Commission to register as a Chinese entity.
It made the “tough decision” to leave Taiwan, effective Jan. 1 next year, due to “market uncertainties” and was in talks with its employees over a redundancy scheme, the company said in a statement.
It would also help sellers on its site complete their outstanding deals to protect their rights and those of the buyers, it said.
Photo: CNA
The company said that it had decided to stop taking new orders before noon yesterday ahead of going offline on Dec. 31, and had also closed down some other functions on its Web site, which was launched in September last year.
The Investment Commission on Aug. 24 declared the site’s operator — UK-registered Claddagh Venture Investment Ltd — to be a Chinese investment and ordered Claddagh to rectify the issue within six months or withdraw its investment.
It also fined Claddagh NT$410,000 for contravening the law on Chinese investments.
A company is deemed to have Chinese investment if more than 30 percent of its shares are held by a Chinese entity or if it is in effect controlled by a Chinese entity, and the commission found that China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), which operates the Taobao e-commerce site in China, held a 28.77 percent stake in Claddagh.
Although that amount is under the legal limit, the commission decided that the company was effectively controlled by Alibaba, based on a number of factors, including that Claddagh could not hold shareholder or board meetings without the consent of Alibaba, due to the size of the stake held by the Chinese firm, and that Claddagh relied heavily on Alibaba to run Taobao Taiwan.
Taobao Taiwan’s user agreement and privacy policy is linked to Alibaba’s agreements for global users of Taobao, which grants Alibaba access to the information of Taobao Taiwan’s users and thus poses a security threat, the commission said.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Chuan-neng (林全能) said that Taobao Taiwan had broken the law concerning Chinese investment and the commission’s decision to fine Claddagh followed regulations.
Executive Yuan spokesman Ting Yi-ming (丁怡銘) said that the government would not allow Chinese companies that want to enter the Taiwanese market to use indirect methods to bypass the law and it has stepped up its investigations into suspect operations.
Additional reporting by AFP
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS