VIDEO GAMES
Tencent buys big Riot stake
Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊控股), China’s biggest Internet company by market value, bought a majority stake in Los Angeles online game publisher Riot Games Inc. The deal is expected to close within 30 days, Riot Games said on Friday in a statement. While terms weren’t disclosed, a person familiar with the matter said the companies were negotiating a price of more than US$350 million. Riot Games said it would keep its Los Angeles-area headquarters and expects to hire aggressively this year. The company also plans to develop new games and expand into other markets, according to the statement.
JAPAN
Major firms’ profits soar
The country’s major companies enjoyed a 24 percent profit gain in the three months to December, the fifth consecutive quarterly increase thanks to brisk foreign demand, a newspaper reported yesterday. The Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun carried out a survey covering 859 listed firms that announced their October-December quarter earnings by Friday. Their aggregate pre-tax profit came to ¥5.32 trillion (US$65 billion) in the period, up 24 percent from the same quarter last year, while their sales rose 5 percent to a combined ¥81.2 trillion, the daily said. Strong demand in emerging economies and North America drove growth in a wide range of export sectors, offsetting the negative impact of a strong yen, the daily said.
AUTOMAKERS
Chrysler fights ‘shyster loans’
Chrysler Group LLC is working to refinance what its chief executive characterized as “shyster loans” that US President Barack Obama’s administration extended as part of a bailout to keep the automaker from collapse in 2009. “I want to pay back the shyster loans,” Sergio Marchionne said at an industry conference, using a derogatory term for an unethical lawyer or politician. “Pay back the loans, get those out and then take [the company] public.” Marchionne, who is also CEO of Italy’s Fiat SpA, has said repeatedly that the high interest rates on loans Chrysler owes the US and Canadian governments have been an obstacle in the automaker’s return to profitability.
AVIATION
DAE cancels Boeing order
US aerospace giant Boeing said Friday that Dubai aircraft leasing firm Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE) canceled an order for 32 of its best-selling single-aisle 737 aircraft. Boeing spokesman Doug Alder said Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, an ambitious, mainly aircraft leasing business launched in February 2006 and partly owned by the crisis-strapped government of Dubai’s investment arm, still has 56 orders on Boeing’s books. DAE had ordered 35 737s, 15 747s and six 777s, he said. In a weekly table on changes in orders and deliveries for commercial aircraft, the DAE cancelation left orders for 737s so far this year at a net zero.
WIRELESS
T-Mobile USA eyes spectrum
Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA unit may be close to a deal to buy wireless spectrum from Clearwire Corp, two people familiar with the talks said. T-Mobile USA is the only potential bidder and the sale of the spectrum could happen by the end of the first quarter, one of the people said. T-Mobile USA isn’t in a rush to buy spectrum and can demand a financially advantageous deal, which could happen in the near term, another person said. Clearwire has warned investors it’s short on cash, saying it would run out by mid-year ahead of a bond sale.
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],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day