Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運) confirmed yesterday that it would change the registration of 11 of its container ships from Britain to Singapore if Britain changes its tonnage tax rules.
“If it is implemented, we will let our 11 ships which fly the UK flag to register in Singapore,” an Evergreen Marine press officer said.
“But our operation in the UK will not change,” she said. “Evergreen’s subsidiary, Evergreen Marine UK, and our shipping agent in the UK will continue their operations as before.”
Chang Jung-fa (張榮發) — chairman of Evergreen Marine — one of the world’s leading container shipping lines — protested the proposed change to Britain’s tonnage tax regulations in an interview on Friday with the Lloyd’s List shipping journal in London and threatened to switch his container ships’ registration.
Plans to have dozens of other ships fly the British flag in the next few years would also be shelved, he said.
Evergreen has 176 container ships, of which 102 are self-owned.
The French line CMA CGM has already stopped transferring ships to British registration because of uncertainty about future rules, Lloyd’s List said.
The move came after Britain’s Treasury proposed tax amendments that included taxing British inland transport separately rather than including it in a door-to-door freight rate, the publication said. However, the proposal, along with others, was withdrawn as the EU reviews tonnage taxes across the bloc.
Industry observers have warned that the tax changes could threaten Britain’s status as a leading shipping nation and could result in the loss of thousands of British jobs.
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
RSS