■INDIA
Interest rates raised 0.25%
The central bank has unexpectedly hiked key interest rates a quarter of a percentage point, as the bank tries to cool high inflation amid a faster-than-expected economic rebound. The bank raised the benchmark repo rate — at which the central bank makes short-term loans to commercial banks — to 5 percent and raised the reverse repurchase rate — the rate at which it borrows from commercial banks — to 3.5 percent, with immediate effect. “These measures should anchor inflationary expectations and contain inflation going forward,” the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement after trading hours Friday.
■HOUSING
Container houses reappear
Rocketing house prices in China’s booming south are forcing low-earners to turn to cheap homes made out of shipping containers, state media said on Friday. Clusters of container villages are cropping up around the boomtown of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, where real estate prices can rise as high as 20,000 yuan (US$2,900) per square meter, the People’s Daily said on its Web site. An 18m² container can be rented for an entire year for just more than 2,000 yuan, the report said. The containers, fitted with kitchens, bathrooms and windows, are gaining popularity among migrant laborers, builders and students, it said.
■FRAUD
Tax evasion investigated
German prosecutors said on Friday they were investigating about 1,100 customers and staff of Swiss bank Credit Suisse’s local operations on suspicion of hiding money from German tax authorities. “The Credit Suisse clients have investments in total of around 1.2 billion euros [US$1.6 billion],” said Dirk Negenborn, spokesman for prosecutors in Duesseldorf, Germany. He said the total amount of tax owed was unclear. Sources said the Credit Suisse information should allow German tax authorities to recover up to 400 million euros.
■MOVIES
Icahn ups ante on Lions Gate
Activist shareholder Carl Icahn raised the stakes in his yearlong dispute with Lions Gate Entertainment Corp on Friday, launching an all-out bid to take over the movie studio following disagreements over its spending. The hostile bid comes a week after Lions Gate rejected Icahn’s offer to buy a larger minority stake and rewrote its bylaws to make such a takeover attempt more difficult in future. The new offer for all outstanding shares also raised the specter of Canadian government involvement because Icahn, an American, could own the Vancouver-based company and cause friction with the country’s cultural policies. Icahn owns almost 19 percent of Lions Gate.
■AIRCRAFT
Boeing speeds up production
Boeing Co will speed up production plans for its 777 and 747 models in anticipation of greater demand from commercial airlines. Boeing, the world’s second-largest aircraft maker behind Airbus, said on Friday it saw the airline industry recovering this year, followed by a return to profitability next year. That should lead to demand for new aircraft in 2012 and beyond, the company said. The company also said the speedup was necessary because of a “conservatively managed approach to production.” Boeing said it did not think the new production schedule would have a material impact on earnings this year. It expects to offer an update to its earnings forecast when it releases first-quarter results next month.
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
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