JAPAN
Prices fall for 24 months
The government reported that consumer prices fell for the 24th straight month last month. It also said yesterday that the nation’s core consumer price index, which excludes fresh food, fell 0.3 percent from a year earlier. Tokyo has battled persistent deflation, and the latest fall in prices underlines prolonged deflationary pressure in the world’s No. 3 economy. The preliminary core consumer price index for the Tokyo area — considered an indicator of broader price trends for the country — also fell 0.3 percent this month.
TOBACCO
Cigarette shortages in Japan
Japan faces a potential cigarette shortage after Japan Tobacco, with a two-thirds share of the market, said it would halt tobacco product shipments domestically for 12 days from Wednesday next week due to procurement and production problems after this month’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. The former state monopoly, still half-owned by the government, said yesterday that the halt was required to restock inventories. Japan Tobacco said its shipment volume for next month would fall temporarily to about 25 percent of last month’s level and return to about 90 percent in May.
Software
Google holds on to software
Google on Thursday said it would keep a tight grip on its “Honeycomb” software crafted specially for tablet computers. The company optimized Android 3.0, known as “Honeycomb,” for a tablet arena dominated by Apple iPads, and was concerned that it could end up used in smartphones where it wouldn’t shine. Google planned to release “Honeycomb” as “open source” code for developers and gadget makers “as soon as it’s ready,” the company said.
AIRLINES
Embraer announces profits
Brazil’s Embraer, the world’s third-largest commercial airplane manufacturer, on Thursday announced it had posted profits of 600.2 million reals (US$341 million) according to the average exchange rate for last year, with total benefits for shareholders of 573.6 million reals. During the past year the company delivered 101 commercial aircraft and 145 business aircraft, it said. Embraer expects a profit of US$420 million this year and net income of US$5.6 billion.
SOFTWARE
Oracle net income up 78%
Database software maker Oracle Corp said on Thursday that its net income rose 78 percent in the fiscal third quarter, helped by a rise in new software license sales and the benefit of three full months of revenue from Sun Microsystems, a company it acquired last year. Net income for the quarter that ended on Feb. 28 increased from US$1.2 billion, or US$0.23 per share a year earlier to US$2.1 billion, or US$0.41 per share. Oracle said it expects fourth-quarter revenue to grow between 10 percent and 14 percent, or between US$10.5 billion and US$10.8 billion. The company forecast earnings of between US$0.69 and US0.73.
TELECOMS
French firm barred
Telekom Malaysia and mobile operator Axiata have barred a French equipment giant from bidding for new tenders for a year, a report said yesterday, after it admitted paying bribes for contracts. The Star newspaper said yesterday that Telekom Malaysia had suspended the company from tenders and contracts for 12 months from Jan. 5, while Axiata will impose the suspension from Feb. 18.
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
China’s top chipmaker has warned that breakaway spending on artificial intelligence (AI) chips is bringing forward years of future demand, raising the risk that some data centers could sit idle. “Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯) cochief executive officer Zhao Haijun (趙海軍) said yesterday on a call with analysts. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that hasn’t been fully thought through.” Moody’s Ratings projects that AI-related infrastructure investment would exceed US$3 trillion over the next five years, as developers pour eye-watering sums
Bank of America Corp nearly doubled its forecast for the nation’s economic growth this year, adding to a slew of upgrades even after a rip-roaring last year propelled by demand for artificial intelligence (AI). The firm lifted its projection to 8 percent from 4.5 percent on “relentless global demand” for the hardware that Taiwanese companies make, according to a note dated yesterday by analysts including Xiaoqing Pi (皮曉青). Taiwan’s GDP expanded 8.63 percent last year, the fastest pace since 2010. The increase “reflects our sustained optimism over Taiwan’s technology driven expansion and is reinforced by several recent developments,” including a more stable currency,
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