■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.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
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