Chairman Eric Chuo of Hiwin Technologies Corp., recognized as Taiwan’s No.1 maker of ball screws and linear guideways for machine tools, has announced his company's landing an order from one of the island’s top chipmakers for 200 units of its wafer production line robots, which pick up and install silicon wafers. The company will begin to deliver the order in the final quarter this year, marki...

Machine tool trade groups of Taiwan and mainland China have announced to co-develop communication protocol standards for Internet-connected machine tools to prepare for smart manufacturing projects worldwide, a trend that is gaining momentum and industry attention globally. Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI) and China Machine Tool & Tool Builders’ Association (CMTBA) made the anno...

Thanks to the weaker NT-dollar, which devalued to about 33 to one US dollar occasionally this summer, most of Taiwan’s listed machine-tool makers achieved fatter earnings in the third quarter than they did throughout the first half of this year, with Goodway Machine Corp. leading the way with earnings of NT$2.5 per share. Industry executives point out that local machine-tool makers usually set...

With ever more resident companies operating there, Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP), one of Taiwan’s three major science or tech industrial parks that include Hsinchu Science Park and Southern Taiwan Science Park, is expected to score annual revenue of NT$550-600 billion (US$17.18-18.75 billion) this year, according to the CTSP Administration. CTSP generated annual revenue of NT$522.1 billio...

The Taiwan-based Hiwin Technologies Corp. announced consolidated revenue of NT$1.19 billion (about US$37.37 million) in August, down 9.5% from the previous month and 16.3% lower year-on-year (YoY). The company is the world’s biggest manufacturer of linear motion products for precision machinery, including ball screws, linear bearings, linear guideways, linear actuators, intelligent linear guid...

Four leading machine-tool makers in Taiwan have recently opened a joint laboratory to develop software that can boost machining precision to more effectively control vibrations transmitted from cutters that typically occur when working on harder metallic workpieces. Aided by the coordination of the Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), the Fa...

In an effort to move upmarket, Tongtai Machine & Tool Co., Ltd., one of Taiwan’s leading machine-tool makers, is aggressively developing five-axis machining centers for the aircraft-building industry in cooperation with the aircraft builder Aerospace Industrial Development Corp. (AIDC) of Taiwan. Industry executives estimate aviation-industry machine tools to increase to account for 5 percent ...

Amid optimism towards recovery of the global steel market, Taiwan-based China Steel Corp. (CSC), the island’s largest steelmaker by size, is widely expected by market observers to raise its nominal prices of domestically-sold steel for Q4 on August 26, when the firm will announce new prices. The reported expectation for higher steel prices to be charged by CSC in Q4 than in Q3 makes sense, giv...

According to statistics released by the Customs Administration under the Ministry of Finance (MOF), Taiwan exported US$1.91 billion of machine tools in the Jan.-July period, down 10.4 percent year on year. In July, the exports sank 17.2 percent from the same month of last year, to US$269 million, with the shipments to mainland China contracting 25.5 percent and the shipments to the United States ...

Impacted by steadily shrinking exports and local economy battered by a slowing Chinese economy, recent upheavals in the Chinese stock market, dropping oil and commodity prices, Taiwan’s industrial production index (IPI) continuously dropped by 1.35 percent year-on-year (YoY) to 106.42 in June, albeit having inched up only 0.02 percent over May, according to the latest report issued by the Ministr...