■INTERNET
Google’s market share up
Internet search giant Google slightly increased its share of the US search engine market last month, online researcher comScore Inc reported on Friday. The Virginia-based company said Google sites led the US search market with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, a gain of 0.4 percentage points from October. The number of searches conducted on Yahoo sites fell 0.1 percentage points to 20.4 percent, comScore said. Searches on Microsoft sites fell 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent. ComScore said Americans made a total of 12.3 billion searches last month, a 3 percent decline from October, which had 31 days as opposed to 30.
■ENERGY
Petrobras postpones deal
Brazilian state oil company Petrobras has postponed finalizing a five-year investment plan amid “uncertainty and volatility” in world oil markets. Petroleo Brasileiro SA said its board of directors unanimously agreed on Friday to reevaluate existing projects and reconsider its spending plan for next year to 2013. Oil prices reached record highs in July and have since tanked more than 70 percent. That volatility has complicated the company’s efforts to forecast earnings and plan spending.
■VIDEO GAMES
Electronic Arts cuts jobs
Struggling US video game maker Electronic Arts Inc announced additional job cuts on Friday and said it would merge or close at least nine studios and publishing facilities. The Redwood City, California, company said it was cutting its worldwide workforce by 10 percent, or 1,000 jobs, an increase of 4 percent over the 6 percent workforce reduction announced in October. “The restructuring also calls for consolidation or closure of at least nine studio and publishing locations,” the publisher of popular titles such as Madden NFL 09, Spore and Warhammer Online said in a statement.
■FINANCE
Citic plan gets go-ahead
Shareholders of Citic Pacific Ltd (中信泰富), the Hong Kong arm of a Chinese government investment firm, approved a bailout from its parent company to cover losses from bad currency bets. A majority of independent shareholders voted in favor of a HK$11.6 billion loan (US$1.5 billion) provided by Beijing-based Citic Group, said a document filed to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late on Friday.
■JAPAN
Cabinet approves package
The Cabinet yesterday approved a ¥4.8 trillion (US$54 billion) second extra budget to finance a massive stimulus package, government officials said. Prime Minister Taro Aso’s Cabinet plans to submit the budget, for the year to March, to parliament early next year, the officials said. The budget, exceeding the ¥1.81 trillion first supplementary budget, is intended to fund cash handouts, a job-creation scheme and other economic measures in the ¥26.9 trillion stimulus package unveiled in October.
■LATVIA
Aid package under way
An aid package for Latvia being drawn up by the IMF and the European Commission will be ready on Friday, a source with knowledge of the talks said. The source did not know the size of the loan. The Diena newspaper said that according to its information the total loan would be worth US$10.47 billion. The loan is to come from the IMF, the commission and the Nordic countries, officials said.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day