NBC Montana
Date: Sep 17 2015
By: The Associated Press

The Taiwan Flour Mills Association has agreed to purchase 1.7 million tons of U.S. wheat over the next two years, much of which will come from Montana.

The association committed to the purchase Wednesday while meeting with state lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Officials say the deal is worth $544 million.

Taiwan purchases roughly 441,000 tons of wheat from Montana annually.

The Taiwanese delegation visits the United States every two years to renew a letter of intent between the association and the United States Wheat Associates, which represent wheat and export groups from each state. Taiwan purchased $3.5 billion worth of U.S. farm products last year.

The delegation is scheduled to visit Montana, Idaho and Kansas.

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/09/17
By: Tein Yu-pin and Lilian Wu

Taipei, Sept. 17 (CNA) Thunder Power (昶洧), a Taiwanese electronics company that debuted its electric car at the Frankfurt Motor show this year, said Thursday it is aiming to put the vehicle on the European market by 2017.

The company said it is also planning to enter the Chinese market by 2018 and the United States after that.

Touting a range of 650 kilometers on a single charge, Thunder Power’s electric car created a stir when it was unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor show, drawing the attention of more than 700 reporters. Thunder Power also received requests for interviews from about 20 professional media enterprises.     [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 18, 2015
By: Crystal Hsu  /  Staff reporter

Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) yesterday said he would respect a

legislative decision to amend the stock transaction and capital gains taxes, as the rapid global slowdown warrants economically friendly policies.

The legislature today is expected to approve proposals to cut the stock transaction tax from 0.3 percent to 0.25 percent and set the capital gains tax at 0.05 percent.

The planned change, the fourth of its kind in three years, would leave tax burdens intact for most investors, but would spare active traders a 0.1 percent levy on share transactions totaling NT$1 billion (US$30.62 million) within a year.

“The proposed revision has turned from taxation into a political issue,” Chang told reporters.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/09/16
Photo courtesy of 30 Monthly
By Christie Chen

Taipei, Sept. 16 (CNA) Taiwanese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to start gaining access to big data if they wish to remain competitive in the coming years, or risk getting left behind, a big data expert warned Wednesday.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an Oxford University professor and co-author of “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,” made the remark at a big data forum in Taipei when asked how Taiwanese OEMs can take advantage of the big data trend.

Big data refers to the flood of digital data from the Internet, social media networks, industrial sensors and various other sources, and the use of predictive analytics or other advanced methods to extract value from such data.

To illustrate his point that OEMs need to get on board with big data, Mayer-Schönberger mentioned the example of an automobile company in Europe that was able to gain the upper hand over one of its suppliers due to the former’s access to big data collected from sensors in its cars.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-09-16
By: CNA

Microsoft is looking forward to teaming up with Taiwanese partners as part of the software

giant’s plans to develop “connected cars” that recognize voice commands, a company executive said Tuesday in Taipei.

Samuel Shen, chief operating officer at the Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, said the company has developed a prototype of a connected car using the “Cortana” voice-recognition virtual assistant of the Windows 10 operating system.

The prototype of the Cortana-based connected car also has its windscreen integrated with a navigation system, allowing the virtual assistant to show the location of the driver’s nearby preferred locations on the windscreen or make restaurant reservations, he said.

“We have not launched similar products due to the high cost. But we hope to have further discussions with Taiwanese partners to jointly explore future possibilities,” Shen said during his opening keynote speech at the TechDays Taiwan developer conference. He did not mention the names of any potential Taiwanese partners nor did he set up a timetable to develop Cortana-based connected cars.     [FULL  STORY]

Local craft beer company Alechemist, founded by National Taiwan University agronomy students, insists on using ingredients grown in Taiwan

Taipei Times
Date  Sep 16, 2015
By: Han Cheung  /  Staff Reporter

What happens when a group of National Taiwan University agronomy students step out of

their labs to tackle the nation’s low agricultural diversity in a culturally relevant fashion?

Enter Alechemist (禾餘麥酒), a craft beer company that insists on using ingredients produced in Taiwan. If a certain crop isn’t being produced in Taiwan, they plan to work with farmers to grow it. So far, they’ve been able to use Taiwanese products as their main ingredients, but are still working on cultivating secondary ingredients such as hops. They’ve come up with one product so far, a cream ale made with self-produced wheat and Tainan white corn, the chewy type often found grilled in nightmarkets.

Founder Chen Hsiang-chuan (陳相全) says there aren’t many products nowadays that represent local food. For example, people don’t make cocktails out of Kaoliang liquor anymore.     [FULL  STORY]

Bloomberg Business
Date: September 15, 2015
By: Justina Lee

The best refuge from the Asian emerging market crash triggered by China’s slowdown is right next door in Taiwan.

Global funds boosted holdings of the island’s equities this month, while pulling money from securities in South Korea, India, Indonesia and Thailand, exchange data show. The Taiex share index has gained 0.9 percent in U.S. dollar terms so far this month, the most in Asia, while benchmarks in Shanghai and Jakarta both slumped by about 6 percent. The Taiwan dollar, Japanese yen and Singapore dollar all gained in September as money exited higher-yielding markets.

Credit Suisse Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley all have “overweight” recommendations on the island’s stocks as companies from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to Pegatron Corp. benefit from strengthening U.S. demand for tech products. A current-account surplus running at 14 percent of gross domestic product is also providing support for the local currency as the U.S. Federal Reserve prepares to raise interest rates.    [FULL  STORY]

Channel News Asia
Date: 15 Sep 2015

TAIPEI: A suspected fake online marketing company that claims to have Google and

Yahoo among its business partners has cheated thousands of Taiwanese investors out of a total of Tw$2.5 billion (US$77 million) since last year, authorities said Tuesday (Sep 15).

OurPPC, which calls itself a pay-per-click management company, offered individuals the chance to invest in Internet search keywords, saying they could earn up to a 23 per cent return within 50 days, the Ministry of Justice’s investigation bureau said.

In a bid to increase the number of investors, the group also organised a tour to Macau in July for anyone who had put US$10,000 into the scheme, and as many as 2,400 people signed up, investigators said.

“According to our information on hand, we can’t assert the company actually exists,” an official in the bureau’s economic crime department told AFP Tuesday. He added that the amount of money obtained through the suspected fraudulent scheme could be even higher.     [FULL  STORY]