INDIA
Drought brings high inflation
Inflation continues to be a cause for concern, the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported yesterday, citing Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. High inflation has been caused by domestic drought and rising prices of commodities globally, Mukherjee said. Mukherjee also said investors shouldn’t panic at movements in the stock market. Foreign institutional investors usually withdraw money from the market at the end of the year to close accounts, he said. The central bank, which has raised interest rates six times this year, is scheduled to review its monetary policy on Thursday.
DIPLOMACY
Leaders pledge cooperation
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have pledged to increase cooperation in trade, security and in pushing to increase the number of permanent seats on the UN Security Council. The pair praised Saturday’s agreement in Cancun, Mexico, and urged the world use it as a starting point for further progress in combating climate change. Singh said the two nations are “hopeful of achieving bilateral trade worth 20 billion euros [US$26 billion] by 2012,” including in civilian nuclear technology. However, he called on Germany to relax its trade export laws, especially in technology.
MIDDLE EAST
Exports to Japan triple
Exports from Arab nations to Japan more than tripled last year, while Japanese investment hit US$4 billion, the head of the Arab League said at an economic forum on Saturday. Arab exports to Japan rose from US$36 billion in 2008 to US$136 billion last year, making Japan the third-largest market after the EU and the US, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said during the opening of an economic forum at Gammarth, near Tunis. Japanese investment increased from US$1.5 billion in 2005 to US$4 billion last year, the Eygptian said.
ENERGY
US$70-US$80 oil favored
Leading OPEC producer Saudi Arabia said on Saturday it still favored a US$70 to US$80 price range for oil, a restatement of a two-year-old policy that will be welcomed by consumer nations worried that rising oil prices may get out of control and hamper global economic recovery. Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi told reporters at an OPEC meeting in Quito: “US$70-$80 is a good price.” The comments came as OPEC agreed, as expected, to keep production restraints unchanged, despite a recent surge in crude prices to US$90 a barrel.
REAL ESTATE
Chongqing to hike taxes
China’s Chongqing is preparing to start a property tax targeting high-end residential properties, the Chongqing Morning Post reported yesterday, citing a statement from the Chongqing municipal government. Home prices in 70 cities climbed 7.7 percent from a year earlier and increased 0.3 percent from October, China’s statistics bureau said on Friday. Sales volume increased 14.5 percent from a year earlier and transaction values surged 18.6 percent, the bureau said. Beijing’s property prices rose 0.2 percent from the previous month, Shanghai added 0.1 percent and those in Yue-yang, a medium-sized city in central China, climbed 2 percent. Only six out of the 70 major cities monitored by the government posted a drop in property prices.
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