Core Pacific City Mall stays open
The Core Pacific City Mall (京華城) which shut down its parking lot for disinfection last Friday has no plan to close the center for further disinfection, the mall's spokesman Juan Hsin-nang (阮信囊) said.
Juan made the remark yesterday after one of their employees working at the lower-level parking lot was found to be a reported SARS case yesterday.
The employee came down with a fever on May 23 and was transferred to Chun-Hsin Municipal Hospital (中興醫院), where he was diagnosed with pneumonia unrelated to SARS, Juan said.
"Since the employee working in the parking lot has no direct contact with customers, we don't think the plan to shut down the whole mall for disinfection is necessary," Juan said.
First Financial seeks OK for sale
First Financial Holding Co (第一金控), the owner of the nation's's fourth-largest bank by assets, applied last week to sell as many as 1 billion new shares. It hired Deutsche Bank AG as the sale's co-manager, alongside Citigroup Inc.
The sale represents more than a quarter of its outstanding shares. The company told shareholders on May 16 it plans to use the proceeds to boost capital in First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) by NT$17.5 billion (US$504 million) after the unit wrote off more than NT$70 billion of bad loans last year.
First Financial plans to raise about US$600 million selling shares to overseas investors to boost capital and fund investments.
Realtek plans to buy Ayuttha
Realtek Semiconductor Corp (瑞昱半導體), which designs chips that control flat-panel displays used in personal computers, plans to buy closely held Ayuttha Technology Corp (優訊科技) to enter the wall-mounted television business, a Chinese-language newspaper reported.
The company plans to buy all shares of Ayuttha, which designs chips for flat-panel TVs, for NT$250 million (US$7.2 million), the newspaper said. The plan is in the final stage, and an unidentified bank has been appointed to help arrange the transaction, the paper said.
Motorola boosts orders
Motorola Inc, the world's second-largest mobile-phone maker, has increased orders with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC,台積電), DigiTimes said on its Web site, without citing the source of its information.
Motorola placed more orders with TSMC, the world's largest supplier of made-to-order chips, for so-called micro-controllers, processors used in electronic products such as hand-held computers and mobile phones, the report said.
The new orders will lift TSMC's oldest plant, called Fab 2, to full utilization, the report said. Fab 2 accounts for about a fifth of TSMC's total production capacity, according to the company's first-quarter earnings report.
Labor dispute rocks Evergreen
Evergreen Marine Corp (長榮海運), the world's fourth-largest shipping company by container capacity, is losing more than US$100,000 a day because five of its ships are locked in East Coast ports in the US following labor disputes, the South China Morning Post said.
The dispute started last year when Evergreen America, the US unit of the company, prevented Taiwanese at its ship-planning division from joining the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the West Coast in the US, the newspaper said.
NT dollar falls
The New Taiwan dollar yesterday remained weak against its US counterpart, dropping NT$0.003 to close at NT$34.712 on the Taipei foreign exchange market.
Turnover was US$541 million.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to