■ SEMICONDUCTORS
Intel creates 2bn-chip
Intel said it has created a 2 billion-transistor chip that will give supercomputers "a leap in performance and capabilities." On Monday, Intel said the new Itanium brand chip, codenamed "Tukwila," increases the power of machines more than twofold and will be available near the end of the year. The "quad core" chip is designed with four processors that share computing workloads, Intel said. "The quad-core chip is coupled with higher bandwidths and large caches to enable a doubling in performance of Tukwila over the current Intel Itanium 9100 series processor," Intel said.
■ BANKING
US probing SocGen trades
US prosecutors are probing 4.82 billion euros (US$7.09 billion) in trading losses at Societe Generale (SocGen), the French bank said yesterday. The bank's New York branch was contacted on Jan. 25 by the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, SocGen spokeswoman Laura Schalk said. The New York probe comes as the US Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly opened an investigation into stock sales by US investor Robert Day, a SocGen board member, in the days before the losses were made public. Day and his family's trusts and foundations sold 140 million euros worth of shares last month.
■ MINING
Beijing not involved in buy
The move by the state-owned Aluminum Corp of China (Chinalco, 中國鋁業) to take a stake in Anglo-Australian mining group Rio Tinto was an independent decision, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) said yesterday. Chinalco, acting with US-based Alcoa Inc, bought 12 percent of the London-listed shares of the world's third-biggest miner for US$14 billion in a sharemarket raid on Friday. "This is an independent decision by the two companies," Yang told a news conference in Canberra, Australia. "They did it, I guess, for their companies' own good."
■ INTERNET
MySpace has new features
MySpace users will be able to add games, e-mail services and other features from outside developers without ever leaving the site under a new program to be fully launched next month. Under the MySpace Developer Platform, an outside e-mail provider can write a program that sits on the personal home page users see when they log on. Users can check for new messages right there. MySpace said developers would be able to write and test interactive programs on up to five users for a month before making them available to the broader MySpace community.
■ AUTOMOBILES
Tata sees Jaguar deal soon
India's top vehicle maker Tata Motors says it hopes to clinch a deal to buy the Jaguar and Land Rover car brands from ailing US carmaker Ford "in the forthcoming weeks." Tata denied British media reports that it had held talks about Fiat's participation in the deal.
■ ENERGY
Solaria, E-Ton sign deal
Solaria Energia y Medio Ambiente SA, the Spanish solar-panel maker that sold shares last year, signed an agreement with E-ton Solar Tech Co (益通光能) for supply of photovoltaic cells. The Tainan-based company will provide Solaria with 40 megawatts-worth of cells, about a third of the Spanish company's needs for this year, Solaria said yesterday in a regulatory filing. E-ton Solar may report a 5 percent decline in its sales last month from December as polysilicon supply from M.Setek has yet to arrive, the DigiTimes reported yesterday, citing industry sources.
■ INVESTMENT
FSC approves changes
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday approved the Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp's proposal to revise its block trade system, which is slated to be implemented on April 4. Under the revision, paired block trade will be allowed between 8am and 8:30am before the market opens. The unit of price quotes will also be lowered from NT$0.1 to NT$0.01 for shares priced between NT$50 and NT$100 and to NT$0.05 for shares priced between NT$10 and NT$50. Paired trades are presently allowed at three time slots: 9:30am to 9:50am, 11:30am to 11:50am and 1:30pm to 5pm. The definition of block trades was also relaxed to include trades of more than 500,000 shares or worth more than NT$15 million (US$468,000).
■ FINANCE
Fubon subsidiary approved
Fubon Financial Holding Co (富邦金控), the nation's second-largest financial services company, said it received approval to set up an insurance subsidiary in Vietnam. An application by Fubon Financial and its subsidiary, Fubon Insurance Co (富邦產險), to invest approximately NT$630 million (US$19.7 million) in Vietnam was approved by Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission, the Taipei-based company said in a filing to the stock exchange today. The company won initial approval from the commission to set up a property insurance subsidiary in Xiamen, China.
■ SEMICONDUCTORS
ProMOS to pay royalties
Mosaid Technologies Inc said Taiwan's ProMOS Technologies Inc (茂德) agreed to pay royalties for six years to settle a patent-infringement lawsuit over semiconductor designs. The amount wasn't disclosed. Mosel Vitelic Inc (茂矽), another Taiwanese chipmaker, agreed to make a lump-sum payment to end the suit against it, Ottawa-based Mosaid said today in a statement. "Our preference has always been to negotiate rather than litigate, and we believe that this is a fair settlement benefiting all parties," Mosaid chief executive officer John Lindgren said in the statement.
■ ENERGY
Crude oil imports increase
The nation's crude oil imports increased 14 percent from a year earlier in December, rebounding from a 24 percent decline in the previous month, the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Bureau of Energy said. Stockpiles of crude oil held by companies plunged 38 percent to 2.88 million kiloliters, about 18.1 million barrels, the bureau said on its Web site. Crude oil imports totaled 5.08 million kiloliters, the bureau said. Rising oil prices boosted the nation's December crude oil bill by 61 percent from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six