■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.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
‘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
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