■ BANKING
Union votes to strike
Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan's labor union said it would strike soon if a new contract agreement is not reached. Union members met yesterday morning and passed the resolution after months of negotiations failed to address job security and other concerns. All but five of the 1,518 members at the meeting agreed to the strike. Union spokesman Wu Wen-hsiung (吳文雄) told the Central News Agency the union had to take action because no agreement had been reached in 11 rounds of talks held since Standard Chartered announced last year that it would take over the Hsinchu International Bank (新竹國際商銀). The union said it would notify the management of the decision tomorrow. It has not set a strike deadline.
■ STOCKS
HSBC eyes sales in China
HSBC Holdings PLC, Europe's biggest bank by value, is talking with Chinese regulators about selling shares in the country. "There have been discussions held with the relevant authorities on the potential listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange," Vincent Cheng (鄭海泉), HSBC's Asia-Pacific chairman, told reporters in Hong Kong yesterday. "There isn't a timetable" for a stock sale, he said. Beijing said on Thursday that it would let foreign companies sell stock and bonds domestically for the first time, responding to US calls to open its markets and acting to increase supply in an equity market that's more than doubled this year.
■ ENTERTAINMENT
PS3 sales to hit target: Sony
Worldwide sales of Sony Corp's PlayStation 3 (PS3) are expected to reach 11 million by the end of this fiscal year, a top executive said in an interview published in the Yomiuri Shimbun yesterday. Kazuo Hirai, chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, told the newspaper he was confident of fulfilling that goal despite competition from Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's XBoX 360. Sony cut the price of the PS3 by 10 percent in Japan to ¥39,980 (US$356) and launched a new slimmed-down version, ratcheting up the competition with its rivals ahead of the crucial year-end sales period. A recent report said the PS3 video games console had outsold Wii in Japan last month.
■ ENERGY
Solar battery plant planned
Sharp Corp, Japan's biggest maker of solar batteries, will spend about ¥100 billion (US$883 million) to build a solar battery plant in Osaka Prefecture, the Nikkei Shimbun reported, citing Sharp chairman Katsuhiko Machida. Sharp will construct the factory for thin-film solar cells in Sakai, next to a liquid-crystal display plant under construction, Nikkei said. It will likely become the world's largest solar-cell plant, capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of capacity yearly, the report said. Sharp expects the factory to be operating by March 2010.
■ AUTOMOBILES
Ford expects Jaguar deal
Ford Motor Co expects to complete the sale of its Jaguar and Land Rover nameplates by early next year at the latest, company executives say. Ford spokesman Mark Truby said on Friday that Ford could not rule out the possibility of a deal for a buyer for the brands before the end of the year. However, Mark Fields, Ford's president of the Americas, said it was possible the firm might not be ready to announce a deal until the early part of next year. The guessing in Detroit is that Tata Motors and Chase & Company's One Equity Partners are the leading contenders for Jaguar and Land Rover.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by