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Daimler enters joint venture

German luxury auto group Daimler AG said yesterday it started a US$300 million joint venture to make multi-purpose vehicles in China.

Daimler, Taiwan-based China Motors (中華汽車) and China's Fujian Motors (福建汽車) have put US$296 million into the venture, Daimler spokeswoman Zhou Bing-yi said in Beijing.

The plant in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, will make Mercedes Viano and Vito multi-purpose vehicles and the Sprinter van, with the first model set to roll off the production line in mid 2009, the company said in a statement.

With annual capacity of 40,000 units, the venture will be "Daimler's south China pillar," said Ulrich Walker, chairman and chief executive of Daimler's Northeast Asia operations.

Daimler said it expected the premium multi-purpose vehicle in China to more than double to about 500,000 units annually, compared with 200,000 now.

Laptop sales grow 24 percent

Sales of PCs or notebook computers in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan reached 16.1 million in the third quarter, representing 13 percent growth over the last quarter and 24 percent growth over the same period last year, according to a report released yesterday by market research group International Data Corp (IDC). Portable PCs are selling fast in retail channels, said Bryan Ma, IDC director of Asia Pacific Personal Systems research.

"Even emerging markets that intuitively would gravitate toward lower-priced desktop PCs have shown increased interest in notebook computers. If things keep going at this pace, the region's portable PC shipments will likely reach the 20-million-unit milestone for the year," he said.

As of the end of September, the top five PC vendors in terms of market share are Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) with 20.5 percent, which continued to maintain its lead in the Asia-Pacific PC market, followed by Hewlett-Packard Co with 12.5 percent, Dell Inc with 8.8 percent, Acer Inc with 5.8 percent and Founder Group (方正集團) with 6.2 percent, IDC said.

Jobless rate increases

The unemployment rate last month among people with at least a bachelor's degree hit 4.97 percent, marking the highest level within the last year, according to statistics released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) on Monday.

A DGBAS official attributed the increase over the past year to the fact that young people frequently change jobs, saying that 83 percent of unemployed university degree holders are "voluntarily" unemployed, having left their positions because of dissatisfaction with their jobs.

Despite an increase in the unemployment rate, the official said that it was not a structural unemployment problem and that the reason behind the increase was relatively simple.

The statistics also show that the unemployment rate among people with a high school degree was 4.49 percent last month, while that of people with a junior high school degree or below was 2.91 percent.

IBM, MediaTek team up

IBM Corp will work with MediaTek Inc (聯發科技) to build chips that wirelessly transmit movies.

The chips rely on a technology called millimeter waves, which use the highest frequency part of the radio spectrum -- at least 100 times faster than today's standards, the companies said in a statement.

Televisions, personal computers and hand-held devices using the chips will be able to transfer high-definition movies almost instantaneously without the need for wiring, IBM said.




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