■ Aviation
Tiger to offer US$6 flights
Budget carrier Tiger Airways announced yesterday it is offering one-way fares at US$6 to its entire network of 10 cities in six Southeast Asian countries. The booking period starts today through April 1 and is valid for mid-week travel on Mondays to Thursdays from July 1 until Oct. 29. The carrier, owned by Singapore Airlines (SIA), said that the offer coincided with a celebration of the completion of its "first-phase network expansion." The airline is extending the low fares to all the cities it covers including Singapore, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Hatyai, Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Macau, Padang and Manila. Tiger is the first budget airline to be granted landing rights for Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra in Indonesia.
■ Aviation
AirAsia in deal with Airbus
Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia has inked a contract to buy 60 new Airbus aircraft, with an option to purchase another 40 A320 jets as part of its regional expansion, a report said yesterday. With the order and option commitment, AirAsia in a statement to Bernama news agency said it had become the single largest customer for Airbus in the Asia-Pacific region. The airline in December said it would buy 40 Airbus aircraft and exercise an option to buy another 40 A320 jets to maintain its position as Asia's leading budget airline. AirAsia said it decided to increase the Airbus order after the rollout and the success of its Indonesian operations, PTAWAIR International (AWAIR). "Within three months of its operations, AWAIR has carried over 120,000 guests and introduced flights to five domestic destinations in Indonesia," it said.
■ Agriculture
New mad cow case
Japan's Health Ministry confirmed the country's 16th case of mad-cow disease, one day before its Food Safety Commission meets to discuss lifting a ban on US beef imports. A nine-year-old Holstein cow raised in Hokkaido and slaughtered on March 24 tested positive for mad cow, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said in a statement on its Web site. Japan has screened every cow slaughtered since September 2001 when it found its first mad-cow case, and halted imports of US beef in December 2003 after a cow in Washington state was discovered to be BSE-infected.
■ Retail
Tiffany cited as target
Tiffany & Co, the largest US jewelry retailer, may be a target for a takeover, Barron's reported, citing money manager and shareholder Shawn Krevetz of Esplanade Capital in Boston. The company may fetch US$40 to US$50 a share in a takeover, Krevetz told the weekly business newspaper. He said Coach Inc would be a good match for Tiffany. Andrea Resnick, Coach's vice president of investor relations, told Barron's the company "isn't interested in making acquisitions." Other potential suitors for Tiffany included Europe's LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, the world's biggest luxury goods maker, Barron's said. Mark Aaron, Tiffany's vice president for investor relations, declined to comment to Barron's about "market rumors." Tiffany recently lowered its profit growth targets because of missteps in Japan, which accounted for one-fourth of the company's US$2.2 billion in sales in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, the newspaper said.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS