Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) is to start selling tickets today before launching services next month, president Glenn Chai (翟健華) said on Friday.
The carrier is to start flights to Macau, Malaysia’s Penang and Da Nang in Vietnam from Jan. 23, a day before next Lunar New Year’s Eve, aiming to tap into the busy holiday, Chai said.
The announcement came at a StarLux news conference in Taipei to introduce its business-class menu, which features Southeast Asian dishes by Michelin-star chef Lam Ming Kin (林明健).
The carrier, founded by former EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) chairman Chang Kuo-wei (張國煒), on Tuesday last week obtained operational approval from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
The flights on Jan. 23 are to take off at 7:30am, 7:40am and 9:20am respectively, StarLux said.
The carrier would offer three round-trip flights to Macau per day, two to Da Nang and one to Penang, it said.
Starlux has said it will focus on routes within Asia in the initial stages of its operations, but would expand to North American destinations from 2022, targeting high-end travelers.
Separately, Tigerair Taiwan Co (台灣虎航), a subsidiary of China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), is to start trading on the Taipei Exchange’s Emerging Stock Board, with its shares valued at NT$41 apiece.
The debut would make it the first budget carrier to be listed on the local bourse.
Tigerair plans to shift its shares to the Taiwan Stock Exchange in the fourth quarter of next year, spokesman Bernard Hsu (許致遠) told the Taipei Times last week.
Additional reporting by Kao Shih-ching
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS