■ Crude oil
Price falls on Iraq plan
Crude oil fell for the first time in three days after the UN Security Council voted to activate a program that uses revenue from the sale of Iraq's oil to purchase humanitarian supplies. The resolution gives UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan authority to negotiate contracts for the purchase of food and medical supplies. The resolution didn't say whether oil export sales would resume to add money to the relief fund. The program sold 1.73 million barrels of Iraqi oil a day last month, according to Bloomberg estimates. Crude oil for May delivery fell US$0.21, or 0.7 percent, to US$30.16 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
■ Bristol-Myers
SEC inquiry expanded
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, the drugmaker that restated US$2.5 billion of sales this month, said US regulators have expanded an inquiry into the company's accounting. Bristol-Myers restated after it loaded up wholesalers with more medicine than they could sell. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which in August started a formal probe into the strategy, expanded the inquiry in December to include accounting issues related to reserves and asset sales. US prosecutors widened their probe too, the company said in a regulatory filing. The company doesn't expect any further restatement, Bristol-Myers said in the filing. The SEC has been scrutinizing more companies' books since the collapse of energy trader Enron Corp.
■ Optical fiber
Corning agrees to settle
Corning Inc, the world's biggest maker of optical fiber for telecommunications networks, agreed to pay US$300 million to settle 12,400 asbestos lawsuits stemming from a pipe-making joint venture. The settlement will reduce first-quarter results by US$200 million, Corning said in a statement. The suits, which date to the 1970s, were filed by people who say they were sickened by asbestos products and sought as much as US$500 million in damages. The agreement clears Corning, which has had seven straight quarterly net losses, from all asbestos liability. Claimants sued its Pittsburgh Corning Corp joint venture with PPG Industries Inc, forcing the venture to seek bankruptcy protection in 2000. PPG, facing 100,000 claims, agreed in May to pay US$2.7 billion. The plaintiffs claimed the asbestos in ceilings and offices where they worked made them ill. Asbestos, used until the 1970s to make building materials and fire retardant, has been tied to a rare form of lung cancer and certain respiratory ailments.
■ Utilities
Duke boosts CEO's pay
Duke Energy Corp, the biggest US utility owner, increased Chief Executive Richard Priory's pay by 23 percent last year to US$5.94 million, even as profit fell 46 percent on an energy-trading slump and lower power prices. Priory was paid US$1.19 million in salary, US$1.68 million in restricted stock awards, US$2.22 million in stock tied to shareholder return targets met in 2000 and US$850,000 in other compensation, the company said in a regulatory filing. He was paid US$4.81 million in 2001. Priory also received 408,400 stock options, which have an exercise price of US$34.41 and expire in February 2012. The options were valued at US$3.92 million at the time they were given, the filing said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained