INSURANCE
Quake to cost AIG US$700m
Insurer American International Group Inc (AIG) said in Washington on Friday that Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami disaster would cost its Chartis subsidiary US$700 million in the first quarter of this year. AIG said the property casualty insurance unit would be hit with another US$200 million in pre-tax insurance losses from other disasters, including the January New Zealand earthquake and huge floods in Australia and Brazil. The preliminary Chartis loss estimates from the Japan disaster excluded AIG’s general insurance operations in Japan, it said. It said the maximum loss it could incur from those operations would be US$575 million.
ELECTRONICS
US fines Samsung unit
A unit of South Korean conglomerate Samsung was fined US$32 million for involvement in an Asian price fixing ring for a key computer monitor component, the US Department of Justice said in Washington on Friday. Samsung SDI agreed to plead guilty to one felony charge in the case, which involved a pact to cut production, fix prices and divvy up market share for color display tubes. The department said that parties hashed out the deals in talks in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, China and elsewhere.
COMPUTERS
Cisco sets cash dividend
Cisco Systems Inc, the world’s largest maker of computer networking gear, on Friday said its first-ever cash dividend would amount to US$0.06 per share and would be paid on April 20. The company has said since last year that it would start paying a dividend equating to an annual yield of 1 percent to 2 percent, but had not specified the amount or precise timing. The dividend amounts to an annual yield of 1.4 percent at Thursday’s closing price of US$17.
BEVERAGES
Berlusconi to protect firms
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government is studying how to keep important businesses in Italian hands amid fears French dairy company Groupe Lactalis is eying Parmalat, the dairy and juice conglomerate. Berlusconi’s office says Italian Economic Minister Giulio Tremonti briefed the Cabinet on Friday about the situation. Italian Agriculture Minister Giancarlo Galan says Italy must “move fast” to ensure Parmalat SpA remains in Italian hands.
AVIATION
Boeing wins 747-8 order
Boeing has won an order for two of its new 747-8 cargo planes from Korean Air in a deal valued at US$639 million at list prices, the companies said in a joint statement on Friday. No delivery date for the planes was announced. In December 2009, the South Korean airline was the first to order both the 747-8 cargo plane and the passenger version, the Intercontinental. With the latest order, Korean Air has five 747-8 Intercontinentals and seven 747-8 Freighters on order.
MEDIA
Liberty Global nears deal
US-based Liberty Global is near a deal to buy Kabel Baden-Wuerttemberg (KBW), Germany’s third-largest cable television company, for between 3.1 billion and 3.2 billion euros (US$4.5 billion), the Wall Street Journal said on Friday. The newspaper, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” said private equity firms CVC Capital Partners and Hellman & Friedman were also bidding for KBW, but Liberty Global appeared to have the upper hand. The Journal said a deal could be reached over the weekend.
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],”
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
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