Shanghai’s Pudong district plans to offer tax incentives to overseas bankers, brokers and insurers to help it become a global financial center and head off challenges from Tianjin and Shenzhen.
Pudong will offer rental subsidies, tax rebates, free annual health checks and ease the process for foreigners to become Shanghai residents. The incentives, which will last until end of 2010, are being discussed with China’s tax authority, district chief Li Yiping said.
“To create a financial hub like the City of London or Wall Street, we need financial experts and overseas talent,” Li’s deputy Yan Xu said in an interview in Beijing. “We need financial-industry workers with technical expertise that can come up with creative ideas, innovative products.”
Pudong, already the China base for companies including Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc, is facing competition from Shenzhen and Tianjin to attract insurance companies, banks and brokerages. The government in March approved Tianjin’s bid for special status as a financial zone and the city is vying to become the base for trading of offshore yuan forwards.
About 10,000 people work at Pudong’s 520 local and overseas financial companies, accounting for as much as a quarter of Shanghai’s economy and making it China’s financial center.
Employees of overseas financial companies will get a 200,000 yuan (US$29,000) one-time rental subsidy and a 20 percent tax rebate, while their chief representatives will get tax subsidies of as much as 40 percent, according to the plan.
“This is very welcoming news,” said Stacy Kwok, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Shanghai partner.
The local government “has been quite focused on developing Pudong as an international financial center,” she said.
Pudong is one of 19 districts that form Shanghai, a municipality of 17 million people. The area’s economy has grown by an annual average of 18.2 percent since 1990, as paddy fields gave way to skyscrapers.
The district is already the base for 173 banks, 202 brokerages, 145 insurers and the larger of China’s two equity bourses, as well as exchanges that trade gold, diamonds and commodities, Yan said.
ASML Holding NV’s new advanced chip machines have a daunting price tag, said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), one of the Dutch company’s biggest clients. “The cost is very high,” TSMC senior vice president Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, referring to ASML’s latest system known as high-NA extreme ultraviolet (EUV). “I like the high-NA EUV’s capability, but I don’t like the sticker price,” Zhang said. ASML’s new chip machine can imprint semiconductors with lines that are just 8 nanometers thick — 1.7 times smaller than the previous generation. The machines cost 350 million euros (US$378 million)
Apple Inc has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the start-up’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence (AI) features to its devices, people familiar with the matter said. The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc’s Google about licensing its Gemini chatbot. Those discussions have not led to an agreement, but are ongoing. An OpenAI
INSATIABLE: Almost all AI innovators are working with the chipmaker to address the rapidly growing AI-related demand for energy-efficient computing power, the CEO said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported about 60 percent annual growth in revenue for last month, benefiting from rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing applications. Revenue last month expanded to NT$236.02 billion (US$7.28 billion), compared with NT$147.9 billion in April last year, the second-highest level in company history, TSMC said in a statement. On a monthly basis, revenue surged 20.9 percent, from NT$195.21 billion in March. As AI-related applications continue to show strong growth, TSMC expects revenue to expand about 27.6 percent year-on-year during the current quarter to between US$19.6 billion and US$20.4 billion. That would
‘FULL SUPPORT’: Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said he hopes more companies would settle in the prefecture to create an area similar to Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park The newly elected governor of Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture said he is ready to ensure wide-ranging support to woo Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to build its third Japanese chip factory there. Concerns of groundwater shortages when TSMC’s two plants begin operations in the prefecture’s Kikuyo have spurred discussions about the possibility of tapping unused dam water, Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said in an interview on Saturday. While Kimura said talks about a third plant have yet to occur, Bloomberg had reported TSMC is already considering its third Japanese fab — also in Kumamoto — which would make more advanced chips. “We are