■INVESTMENT
Taiwan mulls policy change
The government is considering classifying China’s qualified domestic institutional investors as foreign investors when setting the limit on stakes they can own in Taiwanese companies, the Chinese-language Commercial Times reported yesterday, citing unnamed sources. Under current regulations, foreign investors are allowed to collectively own, at most, one third of Taiwan’s commercial airlines, or 20 percent to 60 percent of telecommunications companies, the newspaper reported. The Cabinet will meet this week to discuss the ceilings, the newspaper said.
■EXHIBITION VENUES
New center to open in 2014
An exhibition and convention center in Kaohsiung is slated to begin operations in 2014 at the latest on the back of an increased budget, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Sheng-chung (林聖忠) said on Friday. Wang Chang-hua (汪璋華), head of the Kaohsiung office of the Bureau of Foreign Trade under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said the budget for building the planned Kaohsiung world trade center has been increased to NT$3.68 billion (US$113.2 million) to cope with the rising price of construction materials, up from the previous NT$3 billion.
■AUTOMOBILES
Toyota denies plant report
Toyota Motor Corp said it hasn’t decided to resume building plants in Mississippi and China, after a Japanese newspaper report said the automaker intends to restart suspended construction. Toyota will restart work on a factory in Blue Springs, Mississippi, with a target of opening it by March 31, 2011, the Nikkei newspaper said yesterday, without saying where it got the information. The automaker will also lift its suspension of construction on a plant with China FAW Group Corp (中國第一汽車集團) in Changchun, Jilin Province, the newspaper said.
■CONFECTIONERY
Hershey contacts Cadbury
Hershey Co, exploring its options for a possible bid for Cadbury Plc, has been in contact with Nestle SA, two people familiar with the talks said. An agreement between Hershey and Nestle may not be reached, and Hershey would prefer to bid alone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. Any offer would challenge an unsolicited £10.2 billion (US$17 billion) bid from Kraft Foods Inc.
■BANKING
Regulators close AmTrust
US regulators on Friday shut down Ohio’s AmTrust Bank, the fourth-largest US bank to fail this year. They also closed five others, bringing to 130 the number of US banks to be brought down so far this year by recession and mountains of bad debt. The 130 bank failures are the most in a year since 1992 at the height of the savings-and-loan crisis. They have cost the federal deposit insurance fund more than US$28 billion so far this year. They compare with 25 last year and three in 2007.
■INTERNET
Google goes multilingual
Google has quietly rolled out an online dictionary offering the meanings of words in more than two dozen languages. A visit on Friday to a Google Dictionary service at google.com/dictionary showed a clean, simple Web page with a box for selecting languages from a drop-down list and a second box for typing in words to be defined. The dictionary service offered definitions of words in 28 languages and to translate terms from or into English.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
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