■DEVELOPMENT
ADB appoints new VP
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) appointed Zhao Xiaoyu (趙曉宇) as vice president to succeed the retiring Jin Liqun (金立群), the bank said in a statement. Zhao, who is the deputy governor of the Export- Import Bank of China, will be overseeing the operations of the South Asia Department, the Central and West Asia Department and the Private Sector Operations Department. He served as the executive director for China at the Asian Development Bank from March 1999 to September 2002. The 67-member Asian Development Bank was founded in 1966 and based in Manila.
■ELECTRONICS
Matsushita could drop CRTs
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics, may end production of cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs. Matsushita, which makes CRT TVs in Thailand, Indonesia and Brazil, will shut down those lines as early as fiscal 2010 to focus on plasma and liquid-crystal displays, the Yomiuri Shimbun said earlier yesterday. The company’s global sales of the bulkier TVs peaked in fiscal 2001, when it sold 8.5 million units, the report said. “We haven’t decided on whether we’ll end the production,” Akira Kadota, a company spokesman, said by telephone yesterday. “It’s true that we’re expanding our production of flat-screen models.”
■CELLPHONES
Nokia appoints ex-PM
The world’s top mobile phone maker Nokia has hired former Finnish prime minister Esko Aho as the firm’s new head of corporate relations, the company said on Friday. Nokia said in a statement that Aho, who was centrist prime minister in 1991 to 1995, would begin at the company in the beginning of November. His predecessor Veli Sundbaeck will retire next year and Aho will also take his seat on Nokia’s executive board. Another former prime minister, Paavo Lipponen of the Social Democratic Party, has meanwhile been appointed independent adviser for Nord Stream, the company said.
■TRADE
Ministry offers seminars
The Ministry of Economic Affairs will hold two seminars in Taichung on Aug. 28 and Aug. 29 to help Taiwanese companies looking to invest in China develop strategies to deal with disputes with the Chinese authorities and familiarize them with the assistance that is available to them in handling any problems they might encounter. The ministry said the seminars were part of its plans surrounding the lifting of several restrictions on cross-Taiwan Strait investment and trade exchanges in recent months by the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration.
■ELECTRONICS
No price cut for PS3
Sony Corp does not plan to announce price cuts to its flagship PlayStation 3 games console at Europe’s biggest video games fair in Leipzig, Germany this week, a company spokesman said on Friday. “It’s not going to happen. If you’re coming for that you’ll be disappointed,” Sony Computer Entertainment spokesman Nick Caplin said. In the 12 months ending on March 31, Sony sold 9.24 million units, below its initial estimates of 11 million sales. The company’s video game chief said that the firm was on track for the current year’s target of 10 million sales. Cuts to the Playstation 3’s original high price have helped boost its fortunes in Sony’s three-way battle with Microsoft Corp and Nintendo Co Ltd in the global video game industry. The games fair runs from Wednesday through Friday.
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