FINANCE
Shin Kong to set up leasing
Shin Kong Financial Holding Co (新光金控) said yesterday it was planning to set up a financial leasing company in China to tap into the booming domestic market. Working through its venture capital subsidiary, Shin Kong Financial said it would likely open the financial leasing company in an eastern city, like Suzhou or Shanghai, where a large number of Taiwanese investors have established footholds. Shin Kong Financial said the planned company would work with its banking branch in Hong Kong, which is scheduled to begin operations on May 6, to provide a wider range of services to Taiwanese investors in China. The planned company will also target potential Chinese clients to broaden its customer base, Shin Kong Financial said.
BANKING
Mizuho Bank head resigning
The head of Mizuho Bank, the retail banking unit of Japan’s second-largest lender, Mizuho Financial Group, will resign by June over a massive computer glitch, the Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday. Mizuho was hit by the glitch last month after accounts were flooded with donations in the wake of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan that left more than 26,000 dead or missing. The computer troubles forced shutdowns of Mizuho’s automatic teller machines and disrupted transactions, adding to the woes of businesses and households already badly shaken by the disasters. Mizuho Bank president Satoru Nishibori is seen compiling a plan to prevent a recurrence of such glitches and formally announce his resignation by a shareholders’ meeting in June, the Asahi said, without citing a source.
AUSTRALIA
Firms offered wage subsidy
The Australian government will double the wage subsidy for businesses hit by Cyclone Yasi to prop up the Queensland economy and keep workers in the northeastern state, which represents almost one-fifth of the national economy. Wage assistance for employers hit by the tropical cyclone will extend for another 13 weeks to a total of 26 weeks, Treasurer Wayne Swan said in a statement yesterday. The payment equals about A$470 (US$505) a fortnight for each employee, he said. Tropical Cyclone Yasi struck Queensland in February. The natural disasters may cost the Australian economy A$9 billion, Swan said on April 4.
AVIATION
Airbus surpasses targets
Airbus has made even bigger savings than expected when it launched cuts in the midst of the crisis in 2007 and remains competitive despite the rise of the euro, the company said on Friday. Senior director Fabrice Bregier told Les Echos newspaper that “the targets have been well exceeded” and that the so-called Power 8 program had enabled the company to save “2.5 billion euros [US$3.65 billion], which means as much extra profit, and 10 billion euros in cash.” The firm expected to employ an extra 3,000 people this year.
INTERNET
Amazon problems not over
Amazon was on Friday still wrangling with troubles at its Web hosting service used by Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and other popular Web sites. Amazon EC2 was being slowly restored a day after the onset of disruptive problems, but it may take a while to fully recover, according to updates on the service’s online status dashboard. Web sites hosted by Amazon EC2 were sluggish or knocked offline on Thursday and the company has yet to disclose a cause.
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