BANKING
Citigroup mulls top salaries
Citigroup Inc, recovering after a series of government bailouts, will pay some top executives millions of US dollars in cash bonuses if its core operations earn at least US$12 billion before taxes over the next two years. The awards “are intended to sharpen the executives’ focus” on long-term performance without excess risk, and align their interests with those of stockholders, the third-largest US bank by assets said in a regulatory filing on Friday. John Havens, the bank’s chief operating officer and a longtime confidant of chief executive Vikram Pandit, could get a US$5.2 million bonus under the plan, a sum that could grow significantly higher if the bank performs well. Friday’s filing is the second time this week that Citigroup has discussed long-term compensation for top executives.
INTERNET
Renren prepares for US IPO
Renren.com (人人網), China’s largest social- networking service, is preparing for a US$500 million initial public offering (IPO) this year, according to three people with knowledge of the plan. The banks handling the IPO are Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, according to the people, who declined to be identified because the matter has not yet been made public. According to Analysys International in Beijing, Renren.com has more than 160 million registered users. The site could use the proceeds of the IPO to woo more visitors as it competes with local rivals Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊控股) and Baidu Inc (百度) in the world’s most populous Internet market. Renren has similar features to Facebook Inc, which is blocked in China. No US social--networking sites have gone public, even as their popularity and advertising revenue have soared. That has created pent-up demand among investors. LinkedIn Corp, which announced plans last month to raise US$175 million in an IPO, could become the first to go public.
ENTERTAINMEnt
Club files for bankruptcy
B.B. King’s Blues Club on the Las Vegas Strip has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Las Vegas Sun reported that the club’s owner, Beale Street Blues Co Las Vegas LLC, filed for bankruptcy reorganization of the restaurant and live music club at The Mirage hotel-casino on Wednesday. The club hopes to restructure US$3.7 million in debt and other liabilities. It generated sales of US$8.6 million last year and US$1.1 million so far this year. The venue is part of a Memphis-based group of clubs named after the music legend. King is not named as an officer in the company.
PORTUGAL
Financial woes worsen
Lisbon’s financial agony has deepened, threatening to pitch Europe into a new round of economic turmoil over its debt crisis. The country’s borrowing costs are punishingly high, with the interest rate on its 10-year bonds remaining above 7 percent for a 10th straight session on Friday. As one of the smallest and frailest countries in the 17-nation euro zone runs out of options, its leaders are pressing fellow European nations to adopt new crisis management measures at a summit next month, before a 4.5 billion euro (US$6.13 billion) debt repayment in April. The broad consensus in markets is that the country is doomed to become the third member of Europe’s bailout club, after Greece and Ireland, partly because the continent’s paymaster Germany does not want the issue to fester for much longer.
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
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
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],”
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