■BANKING
Silverton Bank closed down
US authorities on Friday closed down the Silverton Bank in Atlanta, Georgia, and created a “bridge bank” to take over its operations. Silverton Bank is the 30th bank to fail in the nation this year and the sixth in Georgia as the US reels from prolonged recession stemming from a home mortgage meltdown. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement that it had created a bridge bank to take over the operations of Silverton Bank after the bank was closed on Friday by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
■AUTOMOBILES
Fiat in talks over Opel
The head of Italian carmaker Fiat SpA, which is in the process of acquiring US automaker Chrysler, is continuing talks with German officials about a possible takeover of General Motor’s Opel unit, according to media reports yesterday. Both the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Focus magazine reported, citing unidentified sources, that Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne expected to meet German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier tomorrow to present a concept for taking over Opel. Opel has said it needs 3.3 billion euros (US$4.3 billion) to get through the economic crisis, while the German government has said it doesn’t foresee giving direct state aid.
■JAPAN
Major firms reeling
Japan’s major companies slipped into the red for the three months through March 31, battered by a slump in exports following the global financial crisis, a newspaper reported yesterday. Combined pretax losses reported by the 262 non-financial firms listed on Japanese stock exchanges totaled ¥353 billion (US$3.6 billion) for the January-March quarter, a reversal from the year-earlier profits of ¥2.51 trillion, the Nikkei business daily said. Their quarterly revenue fell 24 percent from a year earlier, the paper said. For the full business year through March 31, pretax profit dropped 52 percent and sales slipped 5 percent, the first decline in both profits and sales since in the fiscal year to March 2002, it said.
■LENDING
MasterCard beats forecasts
MasterCard Inc posted better-than-expected quarterly earnings on Friday, but said revenue growth this year will fall short of its targets. The world’s second-largest credit card network said lower expenses and increased fees helped first-quarter results. Net income fell 18 percent to US$367 million, or US$2.80 per share, from US$447 million, or US$3.37 per share, a year earlier. The company’s bigger rival, Visa Inc, beat Wall Street earnings expectations earlier this week, helped by higher fees, lower expenses and increased use of its debit cards by consumers.
■INTERNET
Google rents goats
Internet innovator Google is taking advantage of an old-time principle to thwart wildfires: Goats will eat almost anything. Google has brought in about 200 of the grazers to munch fields around its campus in the Northern California city of Mountain View. “We have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard,” Google director of real estate and workplace services Dan Hoffman wrote in a posting on the company’s official blog. “Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats ... to do the job for us (we’re not ‘kidding’).”
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts