■ MOTORCYCLES
Yamaha overtakes KYMCO
Yamaha Motor Taiwan Co (台灣山葉機車) was the top seller of new motorcycles in Taiwan last month, surpassing Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽機車), which stopped offering price promotions and discounts last month amid stiff price competition. Yamaha sold 30,821 new motorcycles last month, up 18.8 percent from a year earlier, helped by strong sales of its 100cc scooters, statistics compiled by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and Kwang Yang showed. Kwang Yang, better known as KYMCO, slid to the No. 3 spot last month with 28,325 new motorcycles sold, down 3.5 percent from a year earlier. The company was the only one among the nation’s three major motorcycle manufacturers that saw its sales decline last month. Sanyang Industry Co (三陽工業), which sells motorcycles under the SYM brand, ranked third last month by selling 26,916 new motorcycles, up 6.3 percent from a year earlier.
■ SMARTPHONES
AT&T testing new BlackBerry
A delayed top-of-the-line BlackBerry phone from Research in Motion Ltd (RIM) is still undergoing testing by AT&T Inc, and RIM’s co-CEO implied that the carrier wanted to avoid the chorus of complaints about performance that greeted the new iPhone this summer. RIM said in May that the BlackBerry Bold 9000 would go on sale this summer. It has gone on sale in some foreign markets, but is still not available in the US, and no date has been announced. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said on Thursday the phone was still undergoing the certification process in which AT&T tests all new handsets to make sure they work well on its wireless network.
■ BEVERAGES
Coke bottler seeks support
Venezuela’s Coca-Cola bottler is seeking government support to end a conflict with former workers that it says has cost some US$5 million in lost sales. Coca-Cola FEMSA de Venezuela SA legal director Rodrigo Anzola says he has met with the president of Venezuela’s national assembly to solicit her help in resolving the conflict. More than 11,000 former employees began blocking plants and distribution centers belonging to the Mexican-owned bottler on Wednesday. They say the company owes them US$520 million in social security payments.
■ PETROLEUM
Myanmar oil, gas deal inked
A Vietnamese company has signed a deal to explore for offshore oil and gas in Myanmar, a state news report in Yangon said yesterday. The Petrovietnam Exploration Production Corp Ltd, Joint Venture Vietsovpetro and a private Burmese company, Eden Group Company Ltd, signed a contract on Friday for exploration, drilling and production of oil and gas in the Gulf of Martaban, the Myanma Ahlin daily reported.
■ AVIATION
AirAsia exploring options
AirAsia, the region’s largest low-cost carrier, said yesterday it is exploring “various options,” following a newspaper report that it may soon be privatized. “We have continuously been exploring various options at both shareholders and company level,” group deputy chief executive officer Kamarudin Meranum told reporters. “There is nothing to confirm at the moment,” he said in response to the report in business newspaper the Edge. “[AirAsia] has generated a lot of interest but there has always been skepticism about its business model from investors looking at short term returns,” the weekly cited an unnamed source as saying.
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