SUPERMARKETS
Tesco plans China expansion
British supermarket chain Tesco plans to quadruple annual sales in China over the next five years to about £4 billion (US$6.4 billion), a newspaper report said yesterday. Tesco, the world’s third-biggest supermarket group by sales after Wal-Mart and Carrefour, also plans to invest £2 billion in new shopping malls in China, the Financial Times said. The company revealed its plans during an investor and analyst trip to China and South Korea as Britain’s largest retailer steps up expansion efforts in Asia, the report said. Tesco plans to build 50 malls in China over the next five years and develop a further 30 shopping centers, it said.
TECHNOLOGY
Netflix moving to streaming
Netflix introduced a new plan on Monday that, for the first time, relies solely on video streamed over the Internet rather than the DVDs that it has mailed to customers since the company was founded more than a decade ago. The shift demonstrates how quickly consumers have transitioned from physical media players to digital entertainment that can be browsed, watched again, or discarded without ever having handled a disk. The company has already said that its members are watching more content streamed over the Internet than on DVDs. To keep customers happy, the company said it will spend more to license streaming content this quarter than it will on buying DVDs.
TECHNOLOGY
Attachmate to buy Novell
US enterprise software maker Novell announced on Monday that it had agreed to be acquired for US$2.2 billion by Attachmate, an investment group made up of three private equity firms. The deal calls for Attachmate, which is owned by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo, to buy Novell for US$6.10 per share in cash, a 9 percent premium over Friday’s closing price in New York. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based Novell also said it had agreed to sell unspecified intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings, a consortium of technology companies led by Microsoft for US$450 million in cash.
MEDIA
Murdoch eyeing education
News Corp said on Monday that it had agreed to acquire 90 percent of education technology company Wireless Generation for US$360 million in cash. “Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students,” News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said. Education of children aged five through 18 is a “500 billion dollar sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” he said in a statement.
AUTOMOBILES
Indian firm buys Ssangyong
India’s Mahindra & Mahindra has signed a deal with Ssangyong Motor to acquire the struggling South Korean automaker for US$463 million in shares and debt in a bid to create a global force in sport utility vehicles. Ssangyong, which mostly manufactures SUVs and also makes a luxury sedan, the Chairman, went into court-approved bankruptcy protection early last year amid falling sales, mounting red ink and a history of labor strife. The South Korean company was once majority-owned by SAIC Motor Corp. until the Chinese company lost management control during the bankruptcy process.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the