Focusing on bilateral cooperation in the semiconductor industry, the Taiwan-Belgium Joint Business Council meeting, the most important annual business event between the countries, is to take place on Thursday next week, the Belgian Office Taipei said.
Due to COVID-19, the meeting for a second consecutive year is to be a hybrid Webinar, with Taiwanese business representatives gathered in Taipei and their Belgian counterparts joining online, the Belgian office said.
The semiconductor industry is to be the primary focus, given that Taiwan is a leader in the field amid a global chip shortage, the office said.
Photo: Bloomberg
The EU in February unveiled the European Chips Act, which eases rules restricting the use of state aid to attract companies such as Intel Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) to manufacture more chips in the region.
Belgium is home to the world’s leading semiconductor research and development institution, the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC), the office said.
The act encourages Belgium — home to the EU capital, Brussels — to showcase its advantages in the semiconductor market and to attract Taiwanese companies to invest in European projects, it said.
The highlight of the meeting is to be an address by IMEC chief strategy officer Jo de Boeck on “full-stack” innovation trends in the global semiconductor industry, the office said.
The annual meeting, first held in 1981, typically alternates between Belgium and Taiwan, but has taken place in a hybrid format since the emergence of COVID-19.
Belgium is Taiwan’s fifth-largest trading partner among EU member states, after Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and France, government data showed.
In 2020, trade between the two nations totaled US$2.19 billion.
Meanwhile, a delegation led by Minister Without Portfolio John Deng (鄧振中) is to attend the SelectUSA Investment Summit in June, an Executive Yuan official said on Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
The summit is an annual US Department of Commerce event that focuses on facilitating investment that creates US jobs, and is to take place this year in Maryland from June 26 to 29.
Several Taiwan-based firms, especially those in the semiconductor and 5G sectors, are expected to attend, alongside US business representatives, along with federal and state officials.
The semiconductor and 5G sectors were highlighted at the Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue that was held virtually in November last year.
The Executive Yuan official said that although the list of Taiwanese participants has yet to be finalized, the American Institute in Taiwan, the US’ de facto embassy, had sent invitations to several prominent government officials, including National Development Council Minister Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫).
The Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries Promotion Office said that SelectUSA has since its inception attracted US$59 billion in direct investment to the US and created 49,000 jobs there.
Last year, 28 US state governors and eight federal government officials took part in the summit.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS