ELECTRICITY
Taipower mulls rate hike
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), the nation’s biggest electricity producer, could raise electricity prices by 1 percent next month to reflect costs for renewable energy, the Chinese-language Apple Daily newspaper reported yesterday, citing an unidentified official at the Bureau of Energy. The state-run company charges an average of NT$2.6 per kilowatt-hour for electricity, the newspaper reported. Taipower reported a pre-tax loss of NT$18.7 billion last year because of rising costs of liquefied natural gas and coal, the ministry said in a statement on Monday.
ECONOMY
PRC inflation, peg linked
China’s inflation rate will likely rise as long as the nation continues to peg its currency to the US dollar, said Peter Schiff, president and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc. “As long as they maintain the dollar peg, inflation will go up,” Schiff said at Bloomberg’s China Investment Strategies conference in New York on Wednesday. Allowing the yuan to appreciate will “unleash the purchasing power” of the Chinese people, he said.
STEEL
Nippon, Sumitomo in talks
Japan’s biggest steelmaker, Nippon Steel Corp and third-ranked rival Sumitomo Metal Industries Ltd yesterday said they had agreed to launch merger talks. A tie-up between the two would create the world’s second-largest steelmaker behind India’s ArcelorMittal. “Today, Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Industries jointly announced that they have agreed to commence consideration of the integration of their entire businesses,” the two companies said in a joint statement. They plan to complete integration talks by Oct. 1 next year.
AUTOMAKERS
Mazda sinks into the red
Mazda Motor Corp sank into the red in the October-December quarter, unable to overcome a stronger yen and lackluster sales in Japan. The automaker said yesterday it booked a quarterly net loss of ¥2.67 billion (US$32.7 million). It had net profit of ¥4.42 billion a year earlier. Revenue inched up 0.5 percent to ¥560.24 billion, while operating profit slid 90 percent to ¥1.05 billion. Demand for cars in Japan fell sharply in the quarter after government subsidies for green car purchases expired, Mazda said. It also cited foreign exchange losses and higher sales costs.
TELECOMS
Vodafone revenue up 2.5%
Mobile communications company Vodafone says that revenue from telephone, data and other services rose 2.5 percent in the last three months of last year compared with a year earlier, the fifth consecutive quarterly gain for the company. Vodafone said in a trading update released yesterday that growth was led by a 32 percent gain in Turkey, 17 percent in India and 7 percent in the UK. Verizon Wireless, Vodafone’s US joint venture with Verizon Communications, reported a 7 percent increase.
BANKING
Deutsche Bank profit drops
The biggest German bank, Deutsche Bank, yesterday reported a net profit of 605 million euros (US$ 835 million) for the fourth quarter of last year and a full-year figure of 2.3 billion euros. That represented a plunge of 54 percent from the bank’s 2009 net profit of 5 billion euros. The fourth-quarter figure represented a fall of more than 53 percent from the same period a year earlier, and was the result of recent acquisitions and restructuring costs.
MULTINATIONALS
Solid sales boost Unilever
Unilever NV, maker of Dove Soaps, Lipton’s teas and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, says its fourth-quarter earnings rose 15 percent on strong sales growth in emerging markets, though margins suffered slightly from rising commodity costs. Net profit was 955 million euros (US$1.32 billion), up from 831 million euros. Sales rose 12 percent to 10.8 billion euro. The company said its underlying margins slipped by 0.2 percent, as rising commodities costs slightly outweighed the impact of cost cutting and reduced spending on advertising. Sales volumes increased in all regions, though prices were, on balance, flat.
BANKING
Santander net profit drops
Santander, the eurozone’s largest bank, reported an 8.5 percent drop in full-year net profit, dragged lower by provisioning against bad Spanish assets following a property crash. Strong performances at its Brazilian and British units offset lower margins in Santander’s domestic market, where high funding costs and an increase in bad loans are pummeling banks. Net profit came in at 8.18 billion euros and net interest income — broadly what a bank earns on loans, less what it pays for deposits — was 29.22 billion euros.
BANKING
Mitsubishi doubles profit
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc, Japan’s biggest publicly traded bank, posted third-quarter profit that more than doubled as bad-loan costs fell. Net income climbed to ¥195.1 billion (US$2.4 billion) in the three months ended Dec. 31, from ¥76.1 billion a year earlier, according to a statement filed to the Tokyo Stock Exchange yesterday. Mitsubishi UFJ’s nine-month earnings also more than doubled from a year earlier, climbing to ¥551.8 billion, the statement said. That’s higher than the Tokyo-based lender’s ¥500 billion full-year target set in November.
TECHNOLOGY
Hitachi profit up 184 percent
Japanese high-tech firm Hitachi said yesterday its net profit nearly tripled in the quarter to December from a year earlier on demand from emerging Asia and a recovery in the automobile industry. Hitachi said group net profit came to ¥62 billion, up 184 percent from ¥21.8 billion in the October-December of 2009.
PAYMENTS
Visa Q1 profit rises 16%
Payments processing network Visa Inc says its fiscal first-quarter profit rose 16 percent as debit card use continued to grow and consumers returned to using credit cards. The San Francisco company says it earned US$884 million, or US$1.23 per share. Revenue rose 14 percent to US$2.24 billion. Visa says growth was driven by higher payments volume both in the US and globally. The total number of transactions handled in the quarter rose 15 percent to 13 billion.
FASHION
Hugo Boss hails ‘best year’
German fashion group Hugo Boss yesterday hailed last year as “the best year in the group’s history” as it posted an 82 percent leap in net profit to 189 million euros. Sales were 11 percent higher at 1.73 billion euros, a record for the group, and core earnings leaped 31 percent to 350 million euros, a statement said. Chief executive Dietrich Lahrs put the strong results down to investments in China and the US. Boss issued a “very confident outlook for the fiscal year 2011,” with currency-neutral sales expected to rise faster than last year’s rate of 7 percent.
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
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
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six