ELECTRONICS
Sony won’t boost Sharp stake
Sony has scrapped a plan to raise its stake in a joint venture with Sharp manufacturing LCD panels because of a tough business environment, the Yomiuri Shimbun said yesterday. Sony had planned to boost its stake in Sharp’s LCD factory in Sakai from the current 7 percent to 34 percent by April, so that it could be fully involved in the venture’s management. However, the company abandoned the plan in the face of a strong yen and a slowdown in sales of TV sets worldwide, the evening edition of the newspaper reported. Instead, Sony will increase its purchases of LCDs from Taiwanese companies, which offer less expensive panels than Sharp, the paper said.
AUTOMOBILES
GM sets IPO record
General Motors Co’s (GM) initial public offering became the world’s biggest at US$23.1 billion after underwriters swiftly took up additional shares following last week’s IPO. The added shares vaulted GM past Agricultural Bank of China’s (中國農業銀行) US$22.1 billion IPO in July and underscored the strong demand for the taxpayer-rescued automaker’s stock. GM said on Friday that underwriters led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup Inc, exercised their full option on an additional 71.7 million common shares worth US$2.37 billion.
BANKING
Glitch shuts out Australians
A freak computer glitch at Australia’s biggest bank froze cash machines and left millions of people struggling to access their money yesterday. National Australia Bank (NAB) said a corrupted file wiped out a huge number of transactions, including salary payments and transfers, and crashed some ATMs, angering many customers who were facing a weekend without money. Bank spokeswoman Meaghan Telford said that NAB was opening branches yesterday and today and bringing in extra call-center staff as technicians scrambled to fix the problem.
TRADE
Putin upbeat on WTO bid
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday said membership in the WTO next year was “possible.” “I think this is possible and this our wish,” he said after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. “There are virtually no unresolved issues left.” Merkel said that she was in favor of this happening in order to help the Doha round of world trade talks be completed. She continued to pour cold water on Putin’s proposal of a free-trade zone between the EU and Russia, however, saying that although this was desirable, it was more of a long-term goal.
ECONOMY
Japan concerned about US
US growth may slow further and the economy could slip into deflation as unemployment stays high and consumption stagnates, Japan’s Cabinet Office said in an annual report published yesterday. “We consider there is a risk of deflation in the US in the not-distant future,” Tomoko Hayashi, an economist at the Cabinet Office, told reporters in a briefing ahead of the report’s release. US consumer prices excluding food and fuel, the gauge followed by central bankers, increased 0.6 percent from October last year, the smallest gain in year-over-year data going back to 1958, the US Labor Department said this 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