■ELECTRONICS
Hon Hai to sell bonds
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) plans to auction NT$6.82 billion (US$209 million) in five-year bonds on Wednesday, the Chinese-language Commercial Times said yesterday, citing an unidentified executive at a securities company. Hon Hai, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, will become the first Taiwanese electronics firm to sell bonds this year, the newspaper said.
■AVIATION
CAL to add cargo service
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), Taiwan’s largest carrier, plans to resume service of a grounded cargo plane next month because of improving demand for freight services, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News reported yesterday, without saying where it got the information. CAL grounded three Boeing Co 747 freighters in the first half of the year because of the slump in the global cargo market, with one of the planes already back in service, the newspaper said. CAL is using 90 percent of its cargo capacity for routes to the US and Europe on recovering demand for Asia-made goods, the newspaper said.
■ELECTRONICS
UMC offers lower prices
United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電) is offering prices lower than those of rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to grab market share, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News said, quoting an unidentified official at a chip designer. UMC is selling products using advanced 65-nanometer technology at US$4,500 per wafer, 10 percent lower than TSMC’s price, the newspaper said.
■MEDIA
Bloomberg eyes magazine
Financial news agency Bloomberg is considering a bid for BusinessWeek magazine, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said on Friday. The newspaper, citing “people familiar with the matter,” said other potential bidders include Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of investment bank Lazard Ltd, and private equity firms OpenGate Capital and Platinum Equity. The WSJ said bids for the magazine are due next week.
■AUTOMOBILES
Volkswagen expanding
German carmaker Volkswagen AG said on Friday it wanted to spend 4 billion euros (US$5.8 billion) in China between now and 2011 on new products and plant expansions to cope with rising demand. This includes increasing capacity at its Nanjing and Chengdu plants, where it hopes to produce two new models starting in 2012. Volkswagen said the move would be financed through existing cash flow from the region.
■INTERNET
Twitter may open up to ads
Twitter, the micro-blogging platform which has attracted tens of millions of users but has yet to make money, has changed its terms to potentially open up the free service to advertisers. “In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post on Thursday. “We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.”
■BANKING
Regulators sell Corus Bank
US regulators seized Corus Bank on Friday in the fourth-largest bank failure this year and sold its deposits to MB Financial Bank. Long controlled by the Glickman family, Chicago-based Corus Bank crumbled under the pressure of bad loans on commercial real estate and condominium developments in Arizona, southern California, southern Florida and Nevada.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to