Taiwan exports

    TAIWAN’S exports in May likely fell 8.2 percent from a year earlier, down for a fourth straight month, due to weak global demand and a slowdown on the Chinese mainland, a Reuters poll showed.

    The island’s exports dropped nearly 12 percent in April, their steepest monthly contraction in more than two years, hit by a sharp fall in shipments to Europe and the Chinese mainland, with the latter being its second largest export market after the United States. Meanwhile, the consumer price index, as a measure of inflation, is likely to decline 0.65 percent in May from a year earlier, the poll showed. Its CPI has fallen for every month so far in 2015.

    Tire production

    GERMAN automotive supplier Continental said yesterday it aimed to expand capacity at its tire factory in China’s Hefei City and invest over 250 million euros (US$279.6 million) in the site.

    Passenger car tire production in Hefei is set to grow to 14 million a year from 5 million by 2019, and bicycle tire output is seen reaching 13 million a year by 2025, compared with around 2 million now, Continental said in a statement.

    Samsung Electronics

    TECH giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said yesterday that it will expand its Samsung Pay mobile payments service to markets such as China and Europe after an initial launch in South Korea and the United States later this year.

    Rhee Injong, a Samsung executive vice president, told investors at a company event in Seoul that the firm is looking at a “September time frame” for the initial launch of the mobile payments service in South Korea and the United States, coinciding with the launch of the firm’s next flagship smartphone model.