RETAILING
Kindle is Amazon bestseller
Online retailer Amazon.com on Monday said its latest Kindle had become the company’s best-selling product ever. Without giving details of the number of units sold, the company said sales of its third generation e-reader had beaten sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and chief executive, said the product’s US$139 price tag meant owners of tablet computers, such as the iPad, were also buying Kindles. Amazon also announced that it sold about 158 items per second on the peak holiday sales day, Nov. 29.
AVIATION
JAL to cut 170 more jobs
Japan Airlines Corp (JAL), restructuring under bankruptcy protection, will eliminate 170 more jobs this month under a plan to slash the workforce by a third by March as it reduces operations. JAL needs to eliminate 1,500 more employees to meet the goal of trimming 16,000 positions, president Masaru Onishi told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. The carrier is eliminating 49 routes and cutting 103 aircraft after filing Japan’s fourth--largest bankruptcy in January. Operating profit was ¥13 billion (US$158 million) last month as the company cut costs and benefited from an industry-wide increase in travel demand.
INSURANCE
Dai-ichi taking over Tower
Japan’s Dai-ichi Life Insurance said yesterday it would take over Tower Australia Group by May as it seeks to shore up its business in growing overseas markets. Dai-ichi, Japan’s No. 2 life insurer, said the move marks the largest purchase of a foreign competitor by a Japanese life insurer. The Japanese firm is the largest shareholder in Tower with a 28.96 percent stake, following its purchase of ¥37.6 billion in shares in 2008.
FRANCE
INSEE revises growth down
French statistics agency INSEE yesterday issued a downward revision to its second and third-quarter French growth estimates, threatening to complicate government plans to reach 1.6 percent growth this year. The agency attributed its third--quarter downward revision to corporate and public works investment, along with consumer spending, and to the production of heavy-duty goods-transporting trucks in the second quarter.
COMMODITIES
Soybeans hit 28-month high
Soybeans advanced to a 28-month high on concern that dry weather in Argentina will spread to parts of Brazil, hurting crops in the biggest exporter after the US. March-delivery soybeans gained as much as 0.8 percent to US$13.95 a bushel, the highest price for the most-active contract since August 2008. It traded at US$13.8975 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 2:33pm Manila time.
TELECOMS
Alcatel fined for bribes
French-based telecoms equipment giant Alcatel--Lucent agreed to pay US$137 million in fines and penalties to settle US charges it paid bribes to win contracts in Latin America and Asia, officials said. The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission reached the settlement with the Paris-based firm, according to a statement on Monday. Alcatel agreed to pay more than US$45 million to settle the SEC’s charges and to pay an additional US$92 million to settle criminal charges with the Department of Justice.
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