The 10th International Dragon Award (IDA), which honors outstanding life insurance agents in the Asia-Pacific region, will start its four-day annual meeting this year in Taipei today, organizers said yesterday.
More than 4,800 life insurance professionals, representing more than 100 life insurers from 17 countries in the region, will attend the meeting, IDA chairman Wu Po-yang (吳伯揚) said.
The insurance award, initiated by Taipei-headquartered IMM International (保險行銷集團) in 1998, will honor 2,000 winners this year, 600 of whom will be present to receive their awards tomorrow, he said.
For the first time in the award’s 10-year history, China outperformed Taiwan and will present its 700-strong team of award winning sales agents, compared with Taiwan’s 600, Wu said.
“The financial tsunami does not seem to have negatively affected the Chinese market last year as it did the Taiwanese market,” he said.
As each visiting participant is estimated to spend US$230 per day in Taiwan, Eric Chiang (蔣士煌), deputy director-general of the Bureau of Foreign Trade, said the IDA meeting could generate NT$500 million (US$15.3 million) in revenues for Taiwan.
Chiang said Taiwan is well-known for its hospitality and is well-positioned to develop its meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibition (MICE) industry.
“The Ministry of Economic Affairs has prioritized development of the MICE industry this year by setting up a MICE office,” Chiang said.
The MICE office’s project leader, Alice Chou (周麗霞), said yesterday that Taiwan’s strengths in the medical, science, high-tech and engineering fields, as well as some nongovernmental organizations could help it attract more conferences.
The office is in talks with more than 70 international conference organizers and is hopeful that 20 will soon agree to hold their meetings in Taipei, she said.
Separately, Lai Pen-tui (賴本隊), chairman of the Life Insurance Association of the Republic of China, yesterday said the group was opposed to the government’s plan to tax investment-linked policyholders, saying the move would hurt the domestic insurance market.
He urged the government to look to international norms and treat unit-linked policies, 5 percent of whose premiums is saved to ensure life security, as tax-free insurance products.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day