FINANCE
Geithner to visit China
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is traveling to China this week for meetings with Chinese officials and to attend an international financial conference. The US Treasury Department said that Geithner would be in Nanjing, China, on Thursday for meetings with senior Chinese officials. They will discuss the global economic outlook and prepare for high-level US-China talks on economic and foreign policy concerns, scheduled to take place in Washington later this year. While in Nanjing, Geithner will attend a seminar with finance officials from other countries to review the functioning of the international monetary system.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Melanoma drug approved
The first drug to help patients with advanced melanoma live longer won US approval on Friday, a major step in the fight against one of the deadliest types of cancer. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co shares rose 3.2 percent to close at US$27.29 after the Food and Drug Administration approved its drug under the brand name Yervoy for patients in the late stages of the disease. Analysts see sales reaching US$820 million in 2015. Advanced melanoma can quickly spread from the skin to internal organs, such as the brain. Once it spreads, survival is typically six to nine months.
AIRLINES
PAL to outsource services
National flag-carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) has won government approval to hive off some units to cut costs, but the staff must get higher severance pay, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s chief aide said yesterday. The government ruling gives the struggling company a free hand to farm out its in-flight catering, airport services and call center reservations to other companies, to cut its long-terms costs. However the government also ordered the airline to pay a severance pay equivalent to 125 percent of the affected employees’ monthly salaries for each month they were employed, up from the 25 percent that the airline had originally offered.
INDIA
Aviation official arrested
Police say an official at the country’s federal aviation authority has been arrested in a widening investigation of corruption in awarding flying licenses to airline pilots. Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said yesterday the official, a pilot and two other men arrested in New Delhi were involved with a flying school that issued fake certificates of training flights to its students. Four airline pilots had been arrested in the past two weeks for having fake certificates that allowed them to get licenses. The country’s aviation industry has grown rapidly and airlines have struggled to train enough qualified pilots for the jobs.
ROMANIA
IMF approves loan
A Romanian official says the IMF board has approved the country’s request for a new loan agreement. Mihai Tanasescu, Romania’s IMF representative, said on Friday the board has also approved the last evaluation of the existing loan agreement, which ends this spring, the national news agency Agerpres reports. In 2009, Romania took a two-year 20 billion euro (US$28 billion) loan from the IMF, the EU and the World Bank, as its economy shrank by 7.1 percent. Romania imposed harsh austerity measures under the agreement. The new accord will be precautionary, allowing Romania to access 3.6 billion euros (US$5.1 billion) from the IMF and 1.4 billion euros (US$2 billion) from the EU only in emergency situations.
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the