The legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday rejected a clause in a draft bill for the establishment of a state-run international airport zone company that would allow the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to appoint experts from overseas to management positions.
The bill was drafted following the passage of the Statute for Developing an International Airport Park (國際機場園區發展條例), which was promulgated by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in January.
Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said that the ministry included the proposal in the draft bill because it was hoping to recruit foreign experts to serve as vice president or in other top management positions to help manage the new airport company.
Mao cited Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok International Airport, which recently hired a professional manager from Taiwan, as an example.
To attract top foreign professionals, the ministry proposed that they be exempted from the Public Functionary Assets Disclosure Act (公職人員財產申報法).
“We have found that the asset disclosure requirement has prevented many potentially qualified professionals from accepting government-appointed positions,” Mao said.
“That is why a lot of state-run corporations have difficulty finding professionals from the private sector to serve as independent board directors,” he said.
Mao said that the company does not have to hire foreigners, but the article would have given it some leeway in offering positions to qualified individuals from overseas.
However, the ministry’s hopes were dashed when lawmakers insisted that the clause be removed.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Tsao Erh-chang (曹爾忠) said that since the airport management company is a state-run firm, Taiwanese nationals should be considered first.
It is more appropriate to hire foreigners as consultants, he said.
KMT Legislator Tsai Chin-lung (蔡錦隆) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Yeh Yi-ching (葉宜津) also opposed the regulation freeing foreigners from disclosing their assets.
Like their Taiwanese peers, they should be regulated by the Public Functionary Assets Disclosure Act, they said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS