Amtran shifts to China
Local flat-panel TV maker Amtran Technology Co Ltd (瑞軒) will gradually allocate its local capacity to a Chinese operation to save costs, company spokesman Scottie Chiu (邱裕平) said by telephone yesterday.
Amtran has yet to come up with a timetable for the closure of its local plant in Huko (湖口), Hsinchu, Chiu said.
Amtran sells liquid-crystal-display (LCD) TV sets under the Vizio brand in North America. Vizio was the No. 3 brand in North America with a 12.5 percent share of the market in the first quarter.
Chiu declined to reveal how many employees work at the factory, but said that most were foreign labor and worked on short-term contracts. The company has encouraged Taiwanese employees to transfer to the company’s other divisions or to file for prefential packages to leave the firm.
Investment at home increases
Taiwanese businesses that relocated overseas are showing renewed interest in investing at home, committing to 166 investment projects in Taiwan since September 2006, figures released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed yesterday.
The projects, including 65 recorded during the first six months of this year, are estimated to be worth a total of NT$19.5 billion (US$640.7 million), the figures showed.
Thirty-nine projects have been completed and 62 are underway, with the number of workers hired totaling 5,890. The remaining 65 projects are under evaluation, it said.
Of the total investment projects, 115 — worth a total of NT$16.7 billion — were made by China-based Taiwanese companies. Most of the projects were in the machinery, computer, electronics and optical product manufacturing sectors.
Meanwhile, 13 investments were made or planned by Taiwanese businesses in Southeast Asia, 33 by Taiwanese businesses in North America and five from other regions.
TAITRA on the offensive
The government will create a taskforce to help overseas buyers buy products made by Taiwanese manufacturers, Wang Chih-kang (王志剛), the new chairman of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會), said yesterday.
Wang made the remarks during his inauguration ceremony yesterday.
The board of the government agency approved Wang’s nomination as successor to Hsu Chih-jen (�?�) on Tuesday.
Wang said TAITRA would help local companies with Chinese operations sell their products in China rather than export them to other markets to cope with rising labor cost and falling tax refunds in China.
Yahoo goes interactive
Yahoo will allow developers everywhere to create applications throughout the Yahoo properties and make every element of the Yahoo experience more interactive through its Yahoo Open Strategy.
Yahoo chief technology officer Aristotle Balogh said at a briefing in Taipei yesterday that rather than having 25 independent application programming interfaces, a single consistent programming model would be used for all Yahoo properties, which he said would unlock the true power of Yahoo.
Balogh said Yahoo would hold its annual event Open Hack Day in Taiwan for the first time in September, during which local developers will have 24 hours to create an application and present it.
NT drops against greenback
The New Taiwan dollar dropped NT$0.012 to NT$30.372 against the US dollar on turnover of US$755 million.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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