The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA, 外貿協會) yesterday inked a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Tiki, Vietnam’s second-largest e-commerce platform, in a move to expand digital sales channels for Taiwanese companies in Southeast Asia.
“Vietnamese customers are savvy about what they want,” Tiki founder and customer experience officer Tran Ngoc Thai Son said at a signing ceremony in Taipei, adding that Vietnam is a growing market with great potential.
Cosmetics, such as face masks supplied by Dr Wu Skincare Co Ltd (達爾膚生醫科技), should quickly grab the attention of young Vietnamese, he told the Taipei Times.
“The e-commerce platform should lend firm support to small and medium-sized Taiwanese companies that hope to expand their business in Vietnam, which has a population of more than 90 million people,” TAITRA chairman James Huang (黃志芳) said, citing high market acceptance of Taiwanese-made products in that country.
TAITRA also plans to outline a roadmap for Taiwanese businesspeople to tap into Vietnam’s market, helping them to deal with logistics and cash flow problems when conducting cross-border transactions, Huang said.
The Vietnamese e-commerce operator on Thursday opened a Taiwan Pavilion on its platform, which displays various types of products, ranging from Taiwan’s high mountain tea to garments and home appliances.
This marks another move by the government-backed council to build connections with Southeast Asian e-commerce operators after it teamed up with Blibli.com, the largest online shopping platform in Indonesia.
A Taiwan-themed pavilion on Blibli.com, established in September last year, now offers more than 1,900 items, TAITRA said.
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
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.