Oil hit two-year highs in Asian trade yesterday as turmoil continued to wrack the Middle East and threatened to spread to other bigger oil producers in the region, analysts said.
New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for April delivery, rose US$0.93 to US$98.93 per barrel after passing the US$100 mark for the first time since October 2008 on Wednesday.
Brent North Sea crude for April was up US$1.41 at US$112.66.
Photo: Bloomberg
Fears of unrest spreading from embattled Libya were pushing crude prices up, said Victor Shum, senior principal of Purvin and Gertz energy consultants in Singapore.
“The concerns go beyond Libya, which is a relatively small oil producer, to the bigger oil producers that may be affected if the revolt spread,” he said.
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s pledge on Wednesday to crush anti-regime protesters added fuel to the fire, Shum said.
Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves, is the continent’s fourth-largest producer and is a member of OPEC, the cartel that produces about 40 percent of global supplies.
“The world could probably live with US$100 oil as consumers and businesses are now used to it,” said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital Investors.
However, a continued surge in oil prices, especially if unrest in the Middle East spreads, “could start to be more of a dampener on growth,” he said.
Yesterday, Vietnam raised fuel prices by up to 24 percent, adding to soaring inflation and causing gridlock in Hanoi as motorists scrambled to fill their tanks before the increase took effect.
The increase takes fuel prices to record levels and follows a decision earlier this week to raise electricity rates.
Vietnam has been grappling with high inflation as food costs jump. The consumer price index rose 12.2 percent from a year earlier last month.
The gasoline price was increased 17.5 percent to 19,300 dong (US$0.92) per liter and the diesel price by 24 percent to 18,300 dong per liter.
Economists warn the fuel price increases and a 15 percent increase in electricity prices that will take effect on Tuesday will lower living standards and undermine the government’s attempts to curb double-digit inflation.
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