■ Chipmaking
Hynix inks SanDisk deal
South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest memory chipmaker, said yesterday that it had forged a patent cross-licensing and product supply deal with US-based SanDisk. Hynix said the agreement would help it settle patent suits in the US. It follows a similar alliance announced on Tuesday between the South Korean firm and Japanese rival Toshiba, which also settled a patent dispute. It said it also agreed to set up a joint venture with SanDisk to make memory components and sell NAND memory system solutions. SanDisk is the world's largest supplier of flash data storage card products.
■ Banking
HSBC goes local in PRC
HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Bank of East Asia and Citigroup have won approval to incorporate locally in China, making them eligible to launch full yuan services, state media reported yesterday. As locally incorporated companies, the four lenders can provide yuan and foreign exchange services for Chinese citizens after completing the commercial registration process, probably by next month, the China Daily said. They would be no longer confined to taking only deposits larger than 1 million yuan (US$128,000) per client, a limit applied to foreign banks who choose not to take on local status. All four banks said they expected to start operations soon.
■ Telephony
Skype turns to PayPal
Skype said on Tuesday that users of its Internet telephone service will soon be able to transfer money to each other using PayPal. Skype and online financial transaction service PayPal, both owned by California-based Internet auction firm eBay, expected to formally announce the new service by the end of next month. Skype was bought by eBay in October of 2004 and uses a peer-to-peer network to enable users to make free Internet telephone calls to each other on computers. Skype reportedly ended last year with more than 150 million users. Skype users will need to have PayPal accounts to transfer money to each other.
■ Publishing
Cellphone comics planned
Japanese publisher Shinchosha will soon launch what it calls the country's first digital subscription magazine, an online comic regularly transmitted to mobile phones, a news report said yesterday. Com2 will contain about 200 pages of cartoons and is geared toward cellphones so readers in tech-savvy, comic-book-crazy Japan can keep up with their favorites on the go. The new service will be launched tomorrow. It will originally have cartoons in Japanese only, but Shinchosha plans to add English and Chinese.
■ Petroleum
Police question Total boss
The head of French oil group Total, Christophe de Margerie, was called in for questioning yesterday by police probing suspected corruption in Iran and Cameroon, a source close to the matter said. Margerie was to be questioned on suspicions of corruption to win a gas contract in 1997 with the Iranian national oil company NIOC to operate a gas field called South Pars. The investigation was being conducted by the police finance squad, the source said, after a report that Margerie was to be questioned appeared in the French regional newspaper Est Republicain.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS