STEEL
POSCO’s Q3 profit falls
South Korea’s top steelmaker, POSCO, reported an 8.6 percent fall in third-quarter net profit yesterday, blaming the higher cost of raw materials. Net profit for July to last month fell to 1.044 trillion won (US$923 million) from 1.142 trillion won a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Operating profit rose 9.1 percent to 1.111 trillion won year-on-year, while sales were up 24 percent at 8.524 trillion won. “Higher raw materials costs restricted operating profit so we will focus on reducing input costs further,” the steelmaker said in a statement.
ELECTRONICS
India grants RIM extension
India has given BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) an extended deadline of Jan. 31 to provide its intelligence agencies a way of accessing all its services, a report said yesterday. Citing a home ministry note, the Economic Times newspaper said the government had decided to extend the original Oct. 31 deadline by 90 days. It will be RIM’s third reprieve as it seeks to end a three-year standoff with the Indian security agencies which have threatened to shut down services offered on its handsets unless they are given access to secure, encrypted data.
INDIA
Industrial output rises 5.6%
India’s industrial output rose just 5.6 percent year-on-year in August, a sharp decline from a revised 15.2 percent surge the previous month, official data showed yesterday. The figure was well below economists’ forecasts of a 9.9 percent expansion in output and the 10.6 percent growth posted in August last year. Manufacturing, which has an 80 percent weight in the industrial output index, grew 5.9 percent, compared with 10.6 percent in August last year, the federal statistics office said in a statement.
JAPAN
Confidence index drops
Japanese household sentiment slid for a third month last month, adding to signs of a slowdown in domestic demand. The confidence index dropped to 41.2 from 42.4 in August, the Cabinet Office said yesterday in Tokyo. A number blow 50 means pessimists outnumber optimists. The report underscores concern that personal consumption will slow in the coming months as government stimulus measures aimed at encouraging consumers to buy cars and electronics fade.
COMMODITIES
China to resume oil imports
An Argentine official said Monday that China had agreed to lift its suspension of soybean oil imports from the South American nation. “We have information that [the Chinese] are going to allow Argentine shipments of soybean oil,” Argentine Agriculture Minister Julian Dominguez told the state news agency Telam. China halted oil shipments in April of the commodity. Officials never provided an explanation for the suspension, but said it was related to Chinese health concerns.
PETROCHEMICALS
IPO could raise US$4bn
Petronas Chemicals Bhd, the petrochemicals unit of Malaysia’s state oil company, may raise as much as US$4 billion in the Southeast Asian nation’s biggest initial public offer (IPO), said two people familiar with the matter. Banks advising on the sale set an indicative price of 5.20 ringgit (US$1.67) per share, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The company had originally planned to raise about US$2 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said in June.
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